Discussion 2: Startup Roundup

Biggest consumers are only half into their music—don’t spend the time on sites, but enjoy hearing new music

• iLike has potential to surface some of the smaller stuff through Facebook (where EVERYONE is)
• Yet they haven’t gotten into the social graph stuff too much—can’t see who among friends likes the music

Music Discovery Engines: Last.fm and Pandora

• Discovery vs Radio: For avid music listeners, Pandora is predictable in its recommendations. However, it may be used for simple internet radio.
• Would be nice to have statistics on how long users stay on site and how heavily they interact with the site

Streaming: Imeem

• May be useful down the road when internet is ubiquitous, but currently not an alternative to purchasing
• Has inked lots of good deals, and continues to grow as a default tool for bloggers and such

Streaming: Songbird, SkreemR, & Seeqpod

• Songbird is a full application built like iTunes
• Songbird has SkreemR integrated-- crawls the web/scrapes blogs in much the same way Seeqpod does—finding mp3s on existing servers and giving you a simple UI to stream them in one spot—but Songbird also allows you to download the mp3s directly to your computer
• Is that legal? I guess they aren’t physically hosting stuff

Music sales- AmieStreet

• Really cool business model idea (price increases as more and more people purchase songs), BUT…
• Horrible UI—focus more on comments (who cares????) than on song/artist name
• Where is the draw for established artists? Unless the site takes off and everyone wants to use it, they are unlikely to make the same kind of $$ they can (and do) make elsewhere. And same goes for the flip side—no significant number of users will come if they don’t have lots of good music

Music Sales- Rhapsody

• How are these guys still around? Unless you buy into the concept fully and plan on paying your dues until you (or they) die, this seems worthless. You’re paying for music, but it never becomes truly yours—you can’t take it with you, and it disappears when you stop paying your fees

Music Sales- can Amazon be the next iTunes store?

• The 5 billion song giveaway will help gain notoriety, and it’s not like Amazon is going anywhere soon, but until they get some software and hardware to go along with it (and barring a royal F-up from Steve Jobs), they don’t stand much of a chance against Apple.

Is classical a step ahead of the game?

Not known for innovation, the classical genre has taken a step ahead of its pop/rock/rap counterparts, at least in the major label sector. Deutsche Grammophon now sells high quality (320 kbps), DRM-free tracks and albums on their own site from $1.29 a song to $11.99 an album, available worldwide. Are major labels going to go the way of Radiohead (okay, it's a stretch) and bypass the retailers altogether? Or does classical's relative immunity from BitTorrent and other illegal burning allow them to do things that other genres can't (or won't)?

The Basic Premise

The basic premise of having this forum is that the music industry is in a good bit of turmoil right now and thus is succeptable to new innovations. This discussion is based around trying to find what some of the best ways to go about fostering change in the music industry are, specifically with regards to internet technologies. In simpler terms: the music industry is fucked and we want to know what comes next.
To do so, I am assembling vetrans and innovators alike from various ends of the music industry--from self-promoting artists to producers to label executives. Together, we will address the wants and needs of each party involved and try to plot out a path towards a solution that will leave all parties happy and profitable.
Some of the big questions we seek to answer over the course of the discussion include: What do artists/labels/etc want and need to survive? What do listeners and fans want and need? Will the future of the industry function within a label system? Or independently? What are artists willing to pay for? What are listeners willing to pay for? Perhaps most importantly, what drives a consumer to spend money that can be filtered to a band--and from that, is selling music the most profitable model for artists? And what alternatives can exist?
Obviously, some of these questions have easier answers than others. The hope is by creating a discussion amongst a diverse, intelligent, interested, and informed group, we may stumble upon something that may become an element in the future of music, and something that technology can help facilitate. And at the very least, it should be a fun and interesting discussion for all those involved--a conversation that you don't get to have every day.