Making mobile music – the debate

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Lotta

By Charlotta Hedman

- Why can’t you [the record industry] release records as apps? Michael Breidenbrucker of “sonic experience” app RjDj asked during the final debate at the Music 4.5 Mobile Music event.

The room fell silent. All eyes were on Clara Goldsmith from publisher Warner Chappell, who gave a measured answer stating that the tech industry was interested in star power, but that music celebrities were not going to be a free ticket to best-selling apps. Now some in the audience were grinding their teeth.

Peter Jenner accused Goldsmith of in a few sentences having proven everything that techies think is wrong with the music industry. So Goldsmith had to explain that perhaps apps aren’t the best ways of promoting an artists or selling albums when there are systems in place that work. Why spend money from the record industry’s half-empty coffers on developing new products without a proven track record? Björk might be able to do it, but that is because she is Björk. She has an established fan base that enjoys edgy new products, she can take risks because that’s part of her image. Artist manager Leon Alexander of Redlight/Hope Management agreed and said that artists mostly care about earning a living, not about creating fancy new apps.

Breidenbrucker dropped another case study into the discussion. Little Boots vs Inception. RjDj created an experimental app for Little Boots, which didn’t get many downloads. They did the same thing for Inception and that app was a lot more successful. Why? Because the music industry didn’t give them the same access to material or as much emotional support as Christopher Nolan did? No, Goldsmith argued that experimental, immersive apps worked well with the Inception brand, but not so well with a music artist. In the end it all needs to make sense for the PR department, which is perhaps why there wasn’t a conclusion to the debate as they weren’t there.

The discussion continued into the networking drinks after. Breidenbrucker might just have wanted to be contrary, but he had gabbed hold of an issue we had all been skirting around during the event – when technology can offer so many innovating and interesting products, why isn’t the music industry taking advantage of it?

If you have any thoughts on why the tech and music industry find if difficult to work together, get in touch. Do you have any negative, positive or “interesting” experiences? Let us know. We’ll put together a hilarious list of inter-industry fail and win.

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Guest Post: Music 4.5 Mobile Music – an event summary

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Lotta

Ryan Sommer, director of MaintainPR, sums up the latest Music 4.5 event – Mobile Music the sound of the future.

Will Mills, Director Music and Content at Shazam, started the day. Mills, obviously a seasoned barometer with over 15 years experience in digital and mobile, told the audience that “content is nowhere near as important as context,” and proceeded to offer context around the 184 million users now using his musical discovery app, and the ways they are changing business and product to give new engagement experiences.

Key takeaways:

  • There are now over 185 million tags created by users via the Shazam app
  • The company sees big upcoming potential in Near Field Communication (NFC) and its Android Beam, which lets users share specials or concerts when near each other on different Android handsets
  • The Shazam Player is a connected music experience where users can read about how a record was made while listening, and post to social media
  • The company is seeing big returns on second screen (interactive TV implementation) after two Super Bowl spots and Shazam-able broadcast of the Grammy’s
  • Metrics are allowing live tie-in to broadcasts. Ex: Led Zeppelin song at the end of premier Entourage episode led to 20K spike for that track in real-time

Next Mark Mulligan from Music Industry Blog talked through churn and how mobile has made things more immediate via becoming the de facto conduit for direct to fan engagement.

Key takeways:

  • Cloud services are key aspect of winning customer strategies for mobile music delivery
  • It’s not constructive, or relevant anymore, to refer to mobile as a secondary stream
  • 32% of us now consume music on smartphones (Source: BPI)
  • Consumers are readily more involved with software on a mobile device because the app stores have been designed to work without complication
  • As consumers are forced to make big ecosystem bets (Spotify, Facebook, iTunes) 3rd party services who are bundling and Facebook stand to win big, because the social network is so dominant
  • Android still has a long way to come since they have always remained a semi-open ecosystem

The first panel of the day, moderated by Charlotte McEleny of New Media Age was on how to crack the music app market, and featured a good mix of developers: Syd Lawrence of We Make Awesome Sh** and David Hamilton from Pepper App; analyst William Lovegrove (Release Consulting), and seasoned marketer Tim Grimsditch (Six3, and ex-Nokia).

Key takeaways:

  • The concept of an app marketplace went from a response to jailbreaking, to 45 billion downloads in just under 4 years time thanks to the Apple iPhone. No one is music space was prepared for these ramifications
  • Dumb users with “smart” phones = Android may have outsold Apple in handsets, but users aren’t downloading apps because learning curve is higher than Apples
  • Syd Lawrence wants to see more clients come to him to build an app via web so it works across a variety of phones and tablets: “I still don’t understand the appeal of locking yourself into one app store” (i.e. Apple)
  • David Hamilton sees huge growth opportunity in the way current music generation approaches content: “Users want the latest on the band they love NOW.” Tipping point will be location-based direct to fan, pay for one-offs, special videos and tracks
  • Tim Grimsditch says marketing in apps still has a long way to go. iAds in very prominent and embedded Nokia campaign didn’t return. “This is genre specific because gaming industry does show return”

Wrapping up the afternoon before well-earned networking drinks, Martin Macmillan from Bounce Mobile highlighted licensing problems for partial clips when breaking new artists via apps.

Key takeaways:

  • More flexible licensing is required for future of the space, but huge opportunity exists (especially for unsigned bands) for “in app” music
  • Paramount is music that is relevant to app. “If the first thing your user does is mute the device when the game starts, you have failed.

Also, veteran circuit bender, and genre-establishing writer for mobile music creation Ashley Elsdon from Palm Sounds walked the audience through highlights of the best music creation tools available on iOS.

Elsdon would like to see a less traditional approach to development for mobile, since most of today’s music creation tools mimic a desktop environment. He pointed to the app RJdJ as one standout that is thinking beyond the box.

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Guest post: Mobile Music Beyond the App

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Lotta

By Mark Mulligan

Mobile Music has had more than its fair share of false dawns, largely because of wrongly set expectations. The App revolution appears to have finally kicked mobile music into market maturity, though in actual fact it is just one more step on the journey.

The Three Ages of Mobile Music

The history of mobile music to date can be broken down into three key stages (see figure): Stores, Apps, Access.

Mistakes Were Made A Plenty In the First Era of Mobile Music

A lot of consumer got burned in that first stage of mobile music stores, finding themselves subjected to poor quality experiences that paled in comparison even to the supremely average contemporary online stores. The main mistake made was to expect too much from the rudimentary technology that was available: handset memory and screens were both too small and connectivity was far too slow and patchy. WAP 1.0 and GPRS simply weren’t music delivery technologies. When leading stores had sections called ‘My Interrupted Downloads’ you knew you had a problem. Mobile music downloads cost the same (sometimes more) than PC downloads, took longer to download, were poor audio quality. Add to that abysmal navigation and discovery. The first stage of mobile music development failed because mobile tried to be a ‘mini-me’ PC music and was doomed to never stand up to the test.

Apps Let Mobile Music Off the Leash

One of the key reasons apps have been such a runaway success (Apple just announced its 25th billion App download) is because they play to the unique characteristics and strengths of mobile as a channel. They deliver fun and convenient experiences that are typically also social, location sensitive and instantaneous. All integral parts of the mobile phone’s DNA.

App ecosystems combined with booming smartphone adoption and better and faster network connectivity have enabled music services to make mobile a genuine extension of their music experiences. Instead of viewing mobile in a silo, services like Spotify and stores like 7Digital have looked to how mobile can deliver value to the user that the PC cannot. Artists too have been quick to adopt mobile, building apps either with labels or with direct-to-fan providers like Mobile Roadie and TopSpin, recognising the ability of mobile to pull them closer to their fans.

All of which is great of course, but there is a risk that the current infatuation with Apps is a focus on form over function. Apps may have driven a paradigm shift in mobile behaviour but they are in the end just software. They play just the same role as software does for the PC. The reason why it feels so different for Apps is because of the channel strategy, namely App stores. There’s just one place to go and get every type of software you could want, all of course with the same billing details and some guarantee of quality of experience. A far cry from the PC experience of searching the web for the right software, reading reviews and creating a new user profile on yet another online store, hoping that the retailer is safe and secure.

Apps Are the Tools for the Next Stage in Mobile Music, they are Not the Endgame

The wave of the current App boom has lots of force left in it yet. But when it finally does subside, the marketplace is going to be left realizing that Apps are the tool not the endgame. The next stage of mobile music will be putting into practice what the app revolution has taught us about what mobile should be, what role it should play and where it should sit. In a future where music experiences will increasingly depend upon the cloud, the future of mobile is indeed bright. Though of course the rise of tablets has the double effect of accelerating mobile in a broader sense, but also weakening some of the positioning of mobile phones. The simple fact is that tablet’s larger screens deliver PC-like discovery and navigation, coupled with the connected mobility of phones. The reason I raise this point is to highlight that mobile music cannot rest on its laurels, and instead it most continue to ask questions of itself.

Whether you are developing for an artist, a label or a music service, now is the time to start planning for the next era of mobile music experiences. And as you build towards this brave new world, ground your vision in these three learnings from the last two stages of mobile music:

  • Play to the strengths of the channel
  • Identify where mobile can add something new, not just another user experience entry point
  • Really know what music fans want and then exceed their expectations

Mark Mulligan is an independent music analyst and consultant and maintains the leading music industry blog aptly named Music Industry Blog. Mark will be speaking at the Music 4.5 Mobile Music event.

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Mobiles in Africa – a market we shouldn’t ignore

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Lotta

Charlotta Hedman

The mobile industry in Africa is booming. It is the fastest growing mobile market in the world and according to the BBC almost 75 percent of the continent’s one billion people will own a mobile phone this year.

Not many tech companies decide to launch in Africa, but perhaps they should. According to The Economist the International Monetary Fund expects Africa to grow at the same rate as Asia this year, 6 percent. And in the ten years from 2000 to 2010, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were in sub-Saharan Africa: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique, and Rwanda. In eight of the past ten years, sub-Saharan Africa has grown faster than Asia, writes the Atlantic.

So what has happened in a continent that was once regarded as too poor for mobile phones? Some argue that it’s partly because of mobile technology that some Africans and some African countries have started competing with the economic boom in Asia.

“The advent of mobile telephones has brought instant communications to hundreds of millions of Africans, rich and poor, urban and rural. Africans are now on the move. Text messaging and digital money-transfer services, such as Safaricom’s M-pesa in Kenya, have transformed ordinary life.“, writes the Atlantic and adds that a commodities boom has also helped African economies.

Interestingly the technological revolution has happened largely without the help of aid workers and development agencies.

Blogs like Afrinnovator show that there is a burgeoning start-up scene in Africa. But some European start-ups are also taking note. In a recent edition of the Music Ally Report there was an interview with mobile music start-up, Spinlet. The company was founded in Finland, but target mobile music users in Africa .

The company is launching their app in Nigeria and South Africa and plan on breaking into the “final frontier of emerging markets” (the rest of Africa). Historically there have always been strong links between Finland and Africa. Finnish aid organisations have had a presence in countries like Tanzania for over 40 years. Another Finnish giant, Nokia, have a strong presence in emerging markets, which is why Spinlet also have Symbianversions of their software.

Spinlet is a mobile app that allows users to download music to their phones. They offer a two-tier model, where users can either download music or pay for a subscription. The company is focusing on both local music and international artists, where they have already built a relationship with rights holders.

The African market is huge, with about 50 million smartphone users in total at the moment. Nigeria has the highest number of mobile phone users in Africa, 93 million, which according to the BBC is 16 percent of the continent’s total mobile subscriptions, which might be why Spinlet is launching its services there and in South Africa.

But the problems in Africa are also an exaggerated version of what we see in Europe and the States. Piracy, in the sense of physical copies being sold on the street, is a huge problem.

“The market is growing at a fast pace, but there is zero legal music revenue being generated above South Africa and below the Sahara”, Sami Leino, COO of Spinlettells Music Ally.

According to some reports music piracy is having an even more violent effect on artists in Africa. In South Africa gospel artist Lusanda Mcinga was assaulted when she confronted a shop owner who was selling illegal copies of her CDs.

And in Cameroon one of the country’s most popular musicians, Ekambi Brilliant, told the crowd at a conference on piracy that many of the country’s musicians were too poor to pay for their health-care.

“This is because they made little or nothing from their work as musicians and this too because pirates undercut them and made money that should have rightly gone to the real authors of the music”, Ekambi said.

Although some argue that musicians in Cameroon add to the problem and have been caught pirating the works of their more successful colleagues.

Part of the African continent might be on the way up, but many of its one billion inhabitants still live below the poverty line. Sami Leino of Spinlet recognises the challenges and tells Music Ally that their pricing model has been adapted to a market where many of the consumers earn about $200 net per month. In a market like that it’s not possible to charge a dollar per song. But the country’s many mobile users and growing economies are still largely an untapped market. If start-ups like Spinlet manage to offer a viable alternative to piracy, there could be many opportunities for mobile and music companies on a continent that has often been over-looked in the tech industry.

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Guest post: Crunchtime for mobile music

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Lotta

By Ashley Elsdon

Since the rise of Apple’s iOS, mobile music creation has begun an explosion, that is gaining increased acceptance in all areas of the music business. But as we start off 2012 I wonder where this phenomenon will go next. It has been described as “the mobile music revolution”, and as being “the crest of a wave”. I can understand and in many ways share those sentiments, even though at times I have my own doubts.

2011 was a very significant year for mobile music creation. Not just in terms of the sheer number of applications that developers released into a marketplace increasingly hungry for something new but more importantly in terms of the quality of innovation that emerged. I have to admit to spending 2011 in a near constant state of amazement from what developers were able to do with such tiny devices.

But even so I think that it’s important to remember that mobile music is still in its infancy. The app store and iOS (although it wasn’t always called iOS) are less than three years old, and that could be a difficult age. We’ve come to the point where mobile music needs some steering, some good sound advice and a real sense of direction. It could be very easy to head down well tried and tested routes in the music technology world, but I believe that we have a real opportunity to do something different in the mobile space, and now is a good time to start.

This is an ideal time to start tackling some of the themes that are emerging in mobile music such as the continual blur between content creation and consumption, and the commercial and legal issues that this throws up. The future that I would like to see for mobile music is it continuing to deliver the ability to truly democratise music making through accessibility and immediacy.

Ashley Elsdon is a writer and musician who has been blogging about mobile music making since 2006. He founded the Palm Sounds blog (which is now on hiatus). He will also be speaking at the next Music 4.5 event – Mobile Music – The sound of the future.

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Conquering mobile music – streaming or downloads

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Lotta

Charlotta Hedman 

Let us start with the mp3, because that is really where the story begins. The mp3 is a compressed audio file that was developed sometime in the late 80s and released in 1993. At that time most of us didn’t know things were going to change. We were happily buying audio cassettes and CDs. We had slow computers with dial up modems. Some of us might have walked around with clunky mobile phones and been on the cutting edge of the tech. What happened over the next ten years took several industries by surprise.

The dial up speeds got faster, the hard-drives became bigger. Services like Napster and Limewire replaced mixtapes, now there was an easier way of sharing music with friends. Broadband speeds made downloading even easier, why buy a CD when you can download it for free in ten minutes? Mp3s where whizzing between hard-drives from the States to Finland to India. Then came the iPod and iTunes and their more piracy friendly brother the generic mp3-player. Physical music was slowly being reduced to a heavy clutter from the past. Digital was on the rise, both within Steve Jobs’s closed circuit and because of piracy.

The mp3-file ruled supreme, but a couple of years ago another change occurred, streaming. Today we’re walking around with mp3s or other compressed audio files on our smartphones, thinking we are on the cutting edge of tech. But things are changing again.

We are looking at an industry where mobile is overtaking computers. In 2011 more smartphones were shipped than computers. Almost half a billion smartphones were sent all over the world, a 60 percent increase from the year before. Mobile internet usage is doubling year by year. At the same time global digital revenue for music is going up and grew by eight percent in 2011 according to IFPI.

In 2011 Juniper Research predicted that the mobile music market will bring in revenues of $5.5 billion in 2015. Quite a lot considering that the global digital music market was worth $5.2 billion last year. It might be worth taking predictions like this with a pinch of salt, but the digital music market is growing and more and more of us are accessing music with the help of our smartphones.

Even though it would be easy to download files with P2P filesharing apps, mobile phones are offering legitimate and user friendly alternatives. As consumers we are already used to iTunes or streaming apps, mobile piracy seems like unnecessary hassle. This is an opportunity for the music industry and for mobile phone manufacturers.

So far Apple is still the major player in mobile music. With the help of iTunes it has built a platform and a loyal following, but Spotify has also been successful at breaking into the mobile market. Other big mobile players like Nokia and Android are lagging behind, not having been able to offer a platform that can rival iTunes, yet. However the battle is now being fought between compressed digital audio files, like mp3s, and streaming services. And that is where Apple’s hegemony can be broken.

Will users prefer subscription services with unlimited streaming or do they want to own the audiofile? In a sense the mp3-file is the clunky physical item here, it takes up space, it has to be moved from one hard-drive to the next. Sure cloud services is making this easier as they allow you to own your own files and access them from any device. Streaming is lightweight, it can be used anywhere, on any device, all you need to do is to log in. Saving playlists also means that it is possible to access the music offline, which is imperative for any mobile music player.

Where does this leave the mp3, the catalyst for many of the changes in the music industry during the last 20 years. Compressed audio files are used in streaming, but the file is just another container, a CD, a cassette. It is the services that really matter. In the end it is the users who will decide how they want to access their music. Mobile phones are changing the landscape again, but this time it looks like it could be a good thing for the music industry.

Want to know more about how the mobile phone industry is changing the music landscape, check out the next Music 4.5 event Mobile Music – the sound of the future.

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Music 4.5 @ Midem: Marketing and social engagement start-ups

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Lotta

By Charlotta Hedman

We joined the music industry crowd at this year’s Midem. The session of marketing and social engagement music-tech start-ups offered up some interesting newcomers and one old acquaintance. Userdata and metadata were the keywords for many of the companies on the stage.

Pipe, Germany, Simon Hossell, Founder and CEO

The session started confidently with German start-up Pipe, a company that offers a direct communication between computers (“like a pipe between two laptops!!”). Users can drop files into the pipe and they appear on the receiver’s device. The system is platform independent and doesn’t use the cloud.

According to founder Simon Hossell all 800 million users on Facebook are already potential customers. If this seems like an opportunity for some innocent file-sharing, Hossell assures us that his company have hired a big law firm. “If I rented a car and drove to Monaco to rob a casino, no one would accuse Hertz of committing a crime”.

Hossell also wants to help the content industry make money by providing enrichment for the content providers, i.e. metadata. According to him services like Pipe can show that there is a “light at the end of the tunnel for the content industry”

CrowdSurfing by LiveOne Group, USA, Tim Ganschow

Webcasts are solitary experiences, says Tim Ganschow of CrowdSurfing. He wants to change the loneliness we feel when watching gigs online with an app that links into Facebook and shows you who else is watching in a nice grid of pictures underneath the webcast. You can then interact with friends or strangers, “almost like at a real gig”. Ganschow doesn’t offer an explanation of how his user experience would differ from just using Twitter or Facebook while watching a live webstream, but his app will gather user data for the content providers. Ganschow predicts this is the future and is hoping for 100 million users in five years. Revenue will come form licensing, ads, data-analytics and pay-per-view streams.

OleaPark, France, Co-founder and CEO Florent Quinti

OleaPark is one of many French start-ups pitching in English to a mainly French jury panel. It works better than you think. This company wants to make it easier for people to hook up during events. They have created an app that will take your social graph from Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin and compute your compatability with other people at the event. Could it be the Grindr for the business world? Through the app you can ask to be connected to people who interest you, if you’re accepted you get their contact details.

OleaPark wants to sell their program to event organisers and would like to partner with companies like Amiando and Eventbrite. To make the service more interesting to the event they offer a real time analysis of interactions during the event.

Oocto, France, Co-founder Hugo Amsellem
Oocto is a French version of Kickstarter, founded by two 24-year-olds who originally wanted to produce their own record. They offer the same crowd-funding services as other sites, fans can choose how much they want to contribute and then get different rewards (from an mp3 to a gig in their kitchen). We’ve all heard this before, however, Oocto also allows artists to ask fans for help when it comes to finding a good studio or people to help with recording an album. Fans can also volunteer and offer their time instead of money.

Oocto will take 10 percent of the money raise through their site, however there is one little problem, one of the jury members pointed out crowd-funding isn’t actually legal in France yet.

Bandapp, UK, Adam Perry, Founder and CEO
Adam Perry is a professional musician who is playing with the Bloodhound Gang, he’s also launched an app making service for artists. Perry has lost his voice and doesn’t look like he got much sleep last night, but still delivers an engaging pitch.

He wants to own the mobile space and the aim is to become the “mobile Myspace”. The service is free, anyone can build an app on the website and sell music through the Bandapp store. The revenue will come from sponsorship, direct licensing to stores and restaurants, in app ads and store sales.

The company is currently in beta mode. They have 4000 bands using the app and about 20 partners. They are also launching a service which will allow sport teams and groups travelling together (stag parties, weddings, old people) to create their own apps.

Tastebuds.fm, UK, Julian Keenaghan Co-Founder

Tastebuds.fm is a dating site for music fans. Co-Founder Julian Keenaghan came up with the idea while browsing around other dating sites and realising that music is a good filter to match people. Users can connect with Last.fm and Facebook. The site has already had some good PR, mainly thanks to that story about how Coldplay fans are the least likely to have sex on the first date. Tastebuds.fm have no marketing spend and have only used press and PR to reach new users.

They have a growing community of young users who also seem to use the site as a social network around music. Users can hook up and go to gigs together. So far the site has lead to one marriage.

Rockstar Motel, USA, Emily McFadden, marketing director

Rockstar Motel is a social network where fans can sign and represent their artists. The site uses a gaming model to recognise and reward top fans and tastemakers. It also allows the artists to see who their most active fans are and to monitor how fans are talking about them.

The service is free, but there will also be a premium option for users. Rockstar Motel is also hoping to get revenue from advertising and by partnering with venues. So far the site is in beta mode with about a 1000 fans and 250 artists in their database. They are expecting to do a full launch in March and hope that their support network of music industry bigwigs will get them noticed on Facebook and other social media sites.

Jury Member Alex White of the Next Big Thing, which started out as a similar service, comments that it is very difficult to get enough revenue without millions of users, but he wishes the service good luck.

Beloola, France, Tom Gauthier, CEO
Beloola is like Second Life, but for music fans. Although according to CEO Tom Gauthier Second Life is like Paris Hilton, “the media like talking it, but it’s empty”. Beloola on the other hand is a multimedia platform and easy to play.

The idea is to create a more fun experience for fans, who, according to Gauthier, spend too much time trying to keep up with social networks that only offer a false kind of intimacy. Beloola will change all of that and can be embedded on any system or website. Beloola currently has 1000 alpha testers and the beta is launched in April.

iPluggers, Netherlands, Marvin Kuijs, Founder and CEO
Marvin Kuijs is a DJ who has now launched his own start-up. Instead of pitching he’s using a video with an impressive voiceover. He is also wearing a tie with the company logo. For some reason this is more memorable than the pitch itself. iPluggers offer their customers worldwide radio promotion to a network of over 30 000 radio stations.

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What we can all learn from Murdoch’s Myspace failure

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Lotta

By Charlotta Hedman

Last week disgraced media mogul Rupert Murdoch admitted that News Corp had failed when it came to Myspace. His exact words were ”we screwed up in every way possible”. Nice. Now as with any big failure there are lessons to be learned.

1. Be careful what you tweet. The news broke in typical Murdoch style, with a tweet from Murdoch’s already controversial use of the social networking site. During the Consumer Electronics Show Murdoch tweeted ” Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons”. Now Murdoch doesn’t really have to care about Myspace anymore, since he sold it for a pittance (35 million dollars) to Justin Timberlake (and others) in June 2011, but admitting failure won’t do his already dented reputation any favours.

2. Look at the business model. News Corp bought Myspace for 580 million dollars in 2005. Now we all know that hot tech companies are worth a lot of money. That’s how the industry works and a lot of people have invested time, money and their first born children in these astronomical figures. Figures that most people outside the industry find difficult to get their head around. It’s not always obvious why a company like Myspace or Facebook should be worth billions. One simple mistake to avoid is paying over the odds for a company just because everyone else says it’s worth a lot.

3. Stay ahead of competitors. This is a hard one for any big media or tech company. How do you stay ahead of the competition when everyone is looking for the next new and shiny thing. During the last five years Facebook has been the new and shiny thing in social media. Goodbye Myspace, you are now redundant. The question is, can any company stop this kind of exodus once it’s started. Could Apple do it?

4. Think small instead of big. The start-ups out there are going to be the stars of the future. Invest in them and you might win instead of losing billions.

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Guest post: COADEC & Mixcloud Host Richard Hooper, Propose Digital Copyright Exchange to Foster Innovation in Music Tech

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Lotta

By Ryan Sommer 

Yesterday evening at TechHub — a shared office space utilized by many London digital media startups — entrepreneurs and stakeholders surrounding IP in the digital age gathered to address Richard Hooper, a UK government appointed official, who is currently conducting phase one of a feasibility study around implementing a proposed Digital Copyright Exchange (DCE) to foster innovation in UK’s tech sector.

The event, hosted by Mixcloud and The Coalition for a Digital Economy (COADEC), was made up of representatives from government, news media, and digital businesses in areas such as academic and medical research, music, software, and content management solutions.

From a music standpoint, the likes of We7 and Mixcloud believe that a DCE will make it easier for rights owners to be discovered and managed, as well as help offset the risk new startups and digital businesses face in the UK, where labels controlling large catalogs of music rights can change or pull out of contracts on a whim, destroying years of capital, work, and negotiations of smaller innovative companies.

The idea spun out of the UK government’s response in August 2011 to Professor Ian Hargreaves independent review of Intellectual Property (IP) framework, which included among 10 recommendations for growth that:

“In order to boost UK firms’ access to transparent, contestable and global digital markets, the UK should establish a cross sectoral Digital Copyright Exchange… A range of incentives and disincentives will be needed to encourage rights holders and others to take part. Governance should reflect the interests of participants, working to an agreed code of practice.”

Hooper was congenial, and fast to explain exactly how the attendees and other startups in the sector can help. What he’s looking for is detailed evidence, using hard data or summaries of past meetings, that either innovation is being held back, or infringement of copyrighted content remains persistent.

In publishing, for instance, where Mendeley’s web program helps to research and share academic knowledge, remuneration for participating researchers has remained stagnant for years thanks to the University press and commercial publishers who are use to making money off research many now regard should be free.

In the Internet radio sector, the United States started Soundexchange after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998. The UK equivalent of Soundexchange is PPL…but without capped tariffs and a more united offering around streaming. As Clive Gardiner from We7 pointed out, “These are natural monopolies that don’t reflect market value for streaming. An exchange (DCE) format could help solve this.”

It’s thanks to Soundexchange that Pandora built up a user base of over 80 million users and had a successful IPO. During its 2011 fiscal year, Pandora reported $138 million in revenue with a $1.8 million net loss.

If you are a UK entrepreneur or working with a startup that wants to be in on the ground floor to help change policy/technology in the UK to help rights management scale (regardless of whether it is done with government funding or by private market forces) you need to download this form, and let Hooper hear from you by February 10th!!!

Ryan Sommer is director of Maintain PR. He has previously worked at Digg, Slide, and Hellotxt.

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Predicting the top hits of 2012

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Lotta

Charlotta Hedman

As some of us (Simon Cowell?) are waiting excitedly for the song that will top the charts this Christmas, others are already predicting the top hits for next year. Mobile discovery company Shazam has released its list over which artists it predicts will dominate the charts in 2012. The company has looked at at the number of tags and other data indicating which acts are trending with fans. This is their list:

Frank Ocean
A$AP Rocky
YG
Kreayshawn
Lana Del Rey
Spector
Azealia Banks
Friends
Michael Kiwanuka
Excision

Why should we believe Shazam? Well in 2011 Adele topped Shazam’s list of most tagged songs with her hits being identified over 6 million times through the service. In other words Shazam can tap into what people want to listen to or what songs they might be curious about. How that will translate to people actually buying the songs is less clear. However in the case of Adele that seems to have gone pretty well. Then again she’s probably one of the most played artists of last year. People hearing an Adele song in ten different cafes might eventually feel a need to figure out who they’re listening to.

Shazam’s chart is nonetheless an interesting way of predicting next year’s trends. It was also pretty accurate last year and predicted that artists like Jessie J, Clare Maguire and James Blake would top the charts. But Shazam is not the only company trying to understand the world of chart topping music and foresee the hits of the future. Scientists at the university of Bristol claim to have created a software that can predict hit songs (I feel like we’ve heard about this before).

The BBC writes that “The program looks at 23 separate characteristics including loudness, danceability and harmonic simplicity” and is “trained using hit songs from the Top 40 over the last 50 years”. According to the scientists the software can predict chart positions with about 60 percent accuracy.

But as with most of these things, algorithms aren’t very good at predicting human unpredictability (Rage Against the Machine in 2009 anyone?). According to one of the researchers what regularly tripped up the equation were the unexpected hits that became popular for reasons that often had nothing to do with their musical qualities. Even though the scientist admitted that their software was no guide to whether a song was worth listening to, the research did show that music had become easier to dance to and louder over the years.

The Bristol scientists aren’t just keeping the method to themselves, they’ve created a nice little site where they’re predicting chart toppers. It’s not yet clear what they make of this year’s Christmas number 1. The bookies are predicting that a choir of military wives will top the charts.

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