Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Once the world's largest social-networking service and an essential tool for musicians, MySpace has fallen upon hard times, but I'm encouraged by one of the new services the company announced Wednesday.

The MySpace Artist Dashboard is a new free tool for any artist with a music profile page on the site. For artists, it offers demographic information about the people who are visiting your site, and a breakdown of what they're doing there. The geographic data could be particularly useful for small touring bands to help plan their routes. I was also encouraged by the statement from MySpace Music President Courtney Holt, who's been running the company's music initiatives for a couple years now: "Whether you're a small-town garage band, an emerging indie, or a well-established act, our ultimate goal is to provide the right mix of tools and real-time data to help you gain a deep understanding of who your fans are and how best to reach them." That's exactly what MySpace should be focusing on.

An example version of the new MySpace Artist Dashboard. The Black Eyed Peas probably don't need this feature--they have teams of marketers working for them--but your band might.

Unfortunately, the other new piece, a music video service, will languish in obscurity as part of the misguided MySpace Music site. I've always argued that creating a special MySpace Music site for major label acts, and shutting out the unsigned and indie artists that made MySpace in the first place, was a tragic mistake. Now MySpace is perpetuating the exact same mistake with MySpace Music Videos.

Here's an example. The Curious Mystery--a great Seattle band that recently signed with indie label K Records--has a new video out for their song "Black Sand." It's available on their MySpace page. But if you run a search for "The Curious Mystery" or "Black Sand" on the Music Videos hub, this video doesn't show up. That's a failure. (Overall, MySpace still needs a lot of help with music search.)

So MySpace Music Videos is trying to focus on the big numbers--big bands, lots of hits, big advertising bucks. But fans already know where to watch videos from famous artists--it's called YouTube--and therefore have no particular reason to check out the MySpace Music Video hub. The fun of MySpace used to be that your roommate's band could appear right alongside names like Radiohead, and you could surf easily between content from all types of acts. Until MySpace Music stops distinguishing between big and small artists, it will remain irrelevant.

And in case you're wondering, yes, you can find The Curious Mystery's new video by searching YouTube.

I've been checking out a new social-networking site called SuperFan, and I think it could eventually become an interesting resource for music fans. But only if they make it easier to post and share content about favorite bands.

SuperFan is a bit like Facebook, only organized more around your likes and dislikes than around your friends.

If you've used Facebook, MySpace, Imeem, or any of the other countless social-networking sites out there, the drill will be familiar: enter your information to create a profile (here's mine), invite your friends, then engage in various activities like updating your status and uploading video and photos.

The key difference is that SuperFan is organized around the stuff you really like--movies, TV shows, sports teams, and--most relevant to me--music. Once you've created your profile page, you can run searches on particular musicians and albums, and declare yourself a fan. There are multiple different levels, the top being a SuperFan. Once you become a SuperFan of a particular artist--say, Roger Waters--you can embed YouTube videos, upload photos, create quizzes, and so forth. You basically become the maintainer of a fan site about your favorite artists and albums.

The template's pretty simple today--I'd like to see the ability to embed other videos, and even upload MP3 files like I can do on Imeem--but the idea has potential. If enough fans sign up and participate, SuperFan artist pages could become a go-to destination for musical information: instead of going to a band's home page or MySpace page, which tend to be strictly promotional, or to a Wikipedia entry, which tends to be pretty dry, you could go to a page that's lovingly curated by a fan.

But here's the catch. You can become a Fan of as many artists or albums as you want for free, but becoming a SuperFan--where you can actually populate a page with content--requires credits. You get some for free just by signing up, but to declare yourself a fan of a really popular group, like Led Zeppelin, you need to earn additional credits by creating content for other pages, or buy them with PayPal or by such as Netflix.

That seems like a bit of a hassle to me. As a music fan, I prefer Imeem's approach--while it's not as well-organized, there's no barrier to posting content, which means that it's easy to find just about anything you're looking for. And as a social-networking user, I'll probably stick with Facebook, where my friends are today.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

Both TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider posted stories this week about how MySpace is in big trouble. Traffic's down, users aren't spending much time at the site, Google hates its current ad deal that's up for renewal this year, and the relatively new CEOs are apparently planning to lay off up to 50 percent of the company--another 750 people--to save the company.

What happened? I remember when MySpace was the site of choice for musicians and music fans to keep track of their local scenes, and it seemed to have a pretty strong lock on general-purpose social networking until Facebook came along. Now, it looks like one big electronic billboard, and the only people who care about it are band managers and publicists trying to get "adds" for their artists so they can sell these acts up the chain to club bookers, radio stations, and record labels. There was always a commercial aspect to MySpace, but it's overshadowed everything else: Fox Interactive seems to have killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and covered its corpse with blinking Christmas lights spelling the name of the latest disposable major label act.

I exaggerate, but not much. If MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta wants to save the business, here are several steps he should take as soon as possible.

Get back to your core mission. What am I supposed to do at MySpace? I know what I used to do--I used to follow bands to find out when they were playing in my area, and perhaps exchange messages with them. As a musician, I used it to communicate with other local bands and fans and to post gig listings. Simple.

One of many areas that needs improvement.

(Credit: MySpace)

I don't understand how MySpace Music, which lets you watch videos and play songs from bands of all sizes and popularity levels, ties back to this initial vision. Why should I go to MySpace to hear this stuff? How does it tie back with my friends? How does it tie back with local and famous artists I'm following?

Solution: Get rid of MySpace Music as a separate site. Let any artist with a musician's page make their music available to all users in exactly the same way--users run a search, visit the musician's site, and add any content on that site to a playlist that they can post on their own site. Any user can ask any musician to become his friend. And so on. Forget the distinction--it's all music. Which gets me to my next point...

If you're going to offer free music, do it right. As I wrote Thursday, a couple years ago, free online streaming music was hard to find; now, it's commonplace. So let's try using MySpace Music to add some Led Zeppelin songs to my profile page. Nope--the first result is a promotional page for the band's 18-month-old "Mothership" compilation, and the rest of the results are various cover bands.

OK, what about Pink Floyd's "One of These Days"? Once I scroll past the sponsored listings that take up most of the page, the first result is a MySpace home page for a Pink Floyd cover band. Eventually there are some listings that appear to be the song I wanted, but by this time I've pretty much given up and decided that I'll be using Grooveshark or Imeem or any of the other countless competitors that give me the song I want, on demand, right away.

Solution: figure out how your competitors got those deals with the majors, and sign the same deals.

Fix your advertising. Online advertising pays for all the free content (including this blog--hooray!) that we're accustomed to getting, so I'm all in favor of reasonable and relevant ads. But MySpace has littered its most important pages with intrusive and annoying advertisements. My personal home page has two big graphical advertisements for Bank of America, plus graphical plugs for a game by Zynga, a MySpace Karaoke site, and sponsored listings for a concrete company. Admittedly, there hasn't been much action on my page for MySpace to use to target ads, but even when I visit other musicians' profile pages--the main reason I use the site--I'm bombarded by graphical banner ads for low-value products I have no interest in, like mortgage refinancing and online education classes. When I search for a particular song on MySpace Music and the top two-thirds of the page--nearly everything above the fold--is devoted to sponsored links and annoying video ads.

Contrast that with Facebook, where the ads on the most popular pages (home and profile pages) are limited to a clearly labeled right-hand column and are sometimes surprisingly relevant. One relative, a big Jerry Seinfeld fan, didn't know he was coming to her town until she saw an ad on her Facebook page. She actually bought a ticket through the site! I'm willing to bet that hardly ever happens on MySpace.

Solution: devote less space to advertising, eliminate the super-annoying blinking flashing banner ads, and do a better job of optimizing advertisements to individual users.

Fix search. It's better than it used to be, but it's still not very tolerant--unless you enter the exact band name, you might get a lot of irrelevant results. When I look for one of my favorite new Seattle bands, The Curious Mystery, I have to enter the "The" or it won't find them. If I search for one of the bands I used to play with, Half Light, I must enter it exactly: I can't enter "Half Light Seattle" even though that's the exact spelling of their unique MySpace URL (there was another Half Light when we tried to get that space).

Solution: wasn't that Google deal supposed to be about more than advertising? Maybe your next one can include some technology transfer as well.

Let the geeks run the company. One of the most interesting things going on at MySpace right now is the development platform: I'm seeing more digital start-ups who are essentially using MySpace like the Windows of online music, tapping into the functionality and social networking connections that have already been established there, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. This shows promise: build the ecosystem of apps, and users will have to keep coming back.

Solution: I don't know how MySpace is organized today, so I can't get too detailed here, but put the people with technical chops in charge, and don't let the marketers, ad salespeople, and record-industry business development folks run the show.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

Free, on-demand streaming music is a rising tide: since the start of 2009, I've covered relatively new services like Spotify and Just Hear It, and there are plenty of established players like MySpace Music, Imeem, and Grooveshark.

Listen to Michael Jackson's music on Michael Jackson's official Web site. What a novel idea!

(Credit: Sony Music, Michael Jackson)

Instead of trying to stop the tide, Sony Music has wisely embraced it: starting today, the company will introduce streaming music players on the Web sites of its most popular artists, including popsters like Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, and Jacko himself. It makes perfect business sense: instead of letting some third party like Imeem sell advertisements against high-demand music, Sony can sell or display its own ads.

Of course, they couldn't make it too easy--finding the audio on Michael Jackson's site took a few clicks, including one that forced me to identify my country, and the songs were embedded in the Sony-specific MyPlay player, which is an interesting piece of technology but only lets you create playlists with songs from other artists with MyPlay players. More generally, I wonder if it's too late for these label-specific initiatives--I'm sure plenty of hardcore Britney fans have her Web site bookmarked, but most music listeners probably prefer to use services that let you compile lists from multiple artists on multiple labels.

Sony is also adding lyrics to these artists' sites, provided by the company's own Gracenote subsidiary. Excellent move. I can't believe it's taken this long, given the lack of decent lyrics sites out there. In fact, I still don't understand the reluctance to publish lyrics online--what are people going to steal? What money is the artist or copyright owner losing? Kudos for Sony for taking a baby step toward ending this silliness.

A couple days ago, Sonicbids CEO Panos Panay posted about his company's new MySpace plug-in.

If you're not familiar with the company, Sonicbids caters to independent musicians, giving them a quick way to create an online press kit, which they can then submit to venues and concert promoters to get shows. The MySpace plug-in enables artists to incorporate their MySpace info--including that critical measure of online popularity, the number of MySpace friends they have--directly into their online press kit, where promoters and bookers can see it.

Microsoft's early success in drawing developers to its platform is one reason why Windows is so dominant today. Could MySpace follow the same path?

This struck me because it's the second time in a week that I've heard a company acknowledge that MySpace is becoming a standard for online musicians. The other company is still in start-up mode and isn't ready to go public yet, but it's going to provide an online listing service for musicians to post gigs, and for fans to find local live music.

The service sounds similar to Jambase and Bandloop, but with several interesting distinctions. A big one: instead of having to list their gigs themselves or rely on their fans to do it for them, bands will be able to connect their MySpace page to this service. Any gig they post on MySpace will automatically be fed into the system.

As I told an audience member at SXSW who asked about essential tools for online musicians, MySpace may no longer be considered hip or cutting-edge, but it's an absolute essential first-stop for all musicians.

As a band, if you don't have a MySpace page, you might as well not exist. And it appears that third parties are reaching the same conclusion--instead of trying to build new communities from scratch, these companies are using MySpace's APIs to let their customers tap into what's already on MySpace. It's becoming the Windows of music--it's not trendy, it doesn't always work the way you expect it to, but for better or worse, it's ubiquitous.

MySpace might want to take note. Its current business model seems to be based around building yet another online distribution channel for major label artists. In early '90s software terms, it's banking on becoming the Egghead Software of online music.

Instead, maybe it ought to think about how it can become the Microsoft of online music. There's money in the hundreds of thousands of independent musicians and their fans who use MySpace today, but it'll take a clever entrepreneur to figure out how to unlock it.

Of course, I have to wonder: if MySpace is Windows, what's OS X?

Wired's Epicenter blog has the skinny on why MySpace Music failed to create any big waves when it launched. A lot of mistakes were made, including an unclear Web address and lack of any independent music. But I think it boils down to something fairly simple: the designers of the service were focused on the wrong audience. MySpace envisioned the site as an online showcase for major acts on major labels. The labels, anxious for any help navigating the file-trading era, were excited. But nobody bothered to consider why users visit MySpace, and what they might want from a music service on the site. Consequently, playlists were hard to create and share. There was only a superficial connection between pre-existing artists' pages and the new Music pages. Instead of a community of music fans, MySpace Music looked suspiciously like a bunch of billboards.

Listen to the title track to hear what Neil thinks of digital downloads...and bloggers.

(Credit: Neil Young via MySpace Music)

MySpace Music has apparently moved to fix a lot of these problems, and when I checked the site today for the new Neil Young album "Fork in the Road"--available there as an exclusive until April 7--I found it to be fine for the task at hand. Then again, why couldn't Neil have posted these songs on his own Web site? If it weren't an exclusive, I'm not sure I'd think to check MySpace first, or at all, to hear these songs.

I think a similar problem hampered Microsoft's September 2006 launch of the first Zune player. Its most interesting differentiating factor from the market-leading iPod was its built in Wi-Fi connection. But the only thing users could do with it was transfer songs to one another, and those songs could only be played three times or for three days before they expired. In other words, Microsoft gave up too much control over its one differentiating feature to content owners. Better to go back to the drawing board and launch stronger with things like Wi-Fi connectivity to the Marketplace than to draw the ire of customers and scorn of reviewers and end up stuck with a tainted brand for the next few years. (The latest Zune software and service are pretty cool, but nobody knows it--just check out the comments every time I post about Zune.)

Like I told an entrepreneur I met at South by Southwest who was asking me for guidelines for the next big music start-up: concentrate on helping music listeners solve a problem, or do something they couldn't do before. Frame your company around listeners, not artists, not venues, not managers, not promoters, not labels. Listeners.

iPod: lets you carry thousands of songs with you. iTunes: makes it easy to get songs from CDs onto your computer and iPod. Pandora: gives you the "surprise" element of radio, but tuned more to your taste. Shazam: figures out what song's playing right now. Yes, it's possible to build a viable business catering to artists, particularly the emerging "middle class" who would be happy to to sell tens of thousands instead of tens of millions of albums. But there are a lot more listeners than artists, and they're willing to spend money--or at least look at advertisements--if you help them do something they couldn't do before.

Follow Matt on Twitter

Don't take my word for it that the major labels and the system that propped them up for so many years are dead. John Mellencamp, who sang a string of rock hits back in the 1980s and '90s, thinks the business is dead as well. In an articulate and passionate essay on the Huffington Post, he argues that the long slide started well before the rise of file sharing, back to when the business started relying on SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS).

The old way of selling music is as outdated as '80s hairstyles.

(Credit: John Cougar Mellencamp via YouTube)

With SoundScan, instead of relying on surveys from record stores, the labels could see exactly how many units were being moved in any given week, and where those sales were happening. With BDS, instead of relying on phone calls to radio program directors, the labels knew exactly how many spins a song was receiving in each city. Shortly thereafter, the Billboard charts began relying on these automated systems as well. The result: labels ignored the vast majority of the country and focused on a few hits that were getting airplay in the largest cities, and allocated their A&R and marketing budgets accordingly. We ended up, according to Mellencamp, with No. 1 hits that most of the country had never heard, and the rest was a long downhill slide to today's hyperfragmented and piracy-ridden market.

It's a great essay, and I particularly like his side note that the CD was created out of pure greed, as a way to get users to replace their collections of perfectly good vinyl records. (Remember how CDs were supposed to offer clear sound forever? Funny, my CDs from the early 1990s are already wearing out and skipping, but I have records from the 1950s that still play adequately.)

But like the folks at Idolator, who called Mellencamp old and dumb, I completely disagree with his conclusion. Mellencamp says that the irrelevance of radio and fragmentation of the market means there's no organic way for music to find an audience and grow. That's completely wrong--there's more opportunity for smaller bands today than there's ever been. Yes, beginning artists might have to do more work themselves, but recording, manufacturing, and distributing an album has never been cheaper or easier. From ProTools to Disc Makers to CD Baby and Tunecore, and more recent competitors like Routenote and Audiolife, these are tools that anybody can use and master. Sure, online marketing through vehicles like MySpace can't compete with mass radio play in 100 cities, but it's available to anybody--not just the companies' chosen few. When you get a bit bigger, you can enlist services like Topspin to hype your product in the digital realm, for far cheaper than an old-fashioned media blitz. Even getting gigs no longer requires a booking agent, thanks to services like Sonicbids.

In one sense, Mellencamp's right: if you're in music to become a rock star, now's a bad time to be a musician. But if you want to have your music heard as broadly as possible, there's never been a better time.

And for those of you who couldn't sing the chorus to Mellencamp's "I Need A Lover" when you read his essay, click here.

Follow Matt on Twitter

I've been invited by Sonicbids CEO Panos Panay to speak on a panel at SXSW later this month entitled "Artist as Entrepreneur," and as I've been thinking about the subject, my attention was drawn to this recent post on CD Baby's bulletin boards (it was first posted elsewhere). Katie Taylor, the artistic director of Opera Theater Oregon, is worried about the rising perception that art--particularly music--should be available for a very low price or free.

(Credit: CD Baby)

To change this perception, she argues, artists need to convince the general public that there's a fundamental difference between a casual hobby, like a basement-band jam session, and actual art. As she explains, putting on a high quality show for the public is more like planning a wedding. It takes tons of time, talent, and preparation. This kind of art can't continue unless the people putting it on can earn a living wage. And the only way for them to earn a living wage is for consumers to be willing to pay, either through taxes and public funding or directly out of their pocket. If the general public continues to view art as a low-value option that should be available for free, then all art will descend to the level of basement-band jams, and society will be the worse for it.

I've been in both basement bands and "real" bands that are trying to sell recordings and charge for gigs, and there is a hundredfold difference in the amount of effort musicians put into each kind of band. Unfortunately, most listeners are completely unaware of the difference. (It's probably the same for all kinds of art.)

In the case of music, there's a core audience--I'll be generous and say it's around 1%--who understand and care deeply about music, who use their ears more than their other senses, and who couldn't live without it. The other 99% attend shows and buy CDs for other reasons--to fit into a peer group, to stave off the boredom of another evening at home watching TV, to attract a mate, and so on. This isn't conjecture--a Columbia University study I've cited several times strongly suggests that a particular song's popularity is influenced primarily by the opinions of others, and has no relationship to its objective quality (as measured by a control group where listeners voted without being able to see how their peers were voting).

Art's not food. It's a luxury, not a necessity. Which means that the only way for an artist to make money is to draw some of that 99% who feel they don't need it. Somehow, you have to convince them that your art is different, and is worth paying for. And the only way to reach that tipping point is--here's an evil word--marketing.

There are many ways to market your music, including some that seem more organic or "honest" to some artists because they rely primarily on word of mouth. The Internet and the rise of digital music has made it easier than ever to get the word out--MySpace and CD Baby are the bare-bones minimum for starting bands, and there are dozens of other online services that help accomplish specific tasks, from licensing your music for commercial use in film and TV to helping you get gigs.

Or, if you're still too lazy or pure to market yourself, there are plenty of organizations that will help you. Just the other day, I talked to a new company called The Republic Project that will create a digital marketing and distribution plan for semi-established bands in exchange for a cut of pre-release sales. The highlight: they're giving artists handheld digital video cameras so they can create videos of their recording sessions. Then Republic will post these videos online in hopes of building fan anticipation for a new album. It may not work, but making this kind of marketing effort is vital.

My point: the inherent value of art to the creator is very high--I value the experiences I've had playing music more than many other things in my life. But the inherent value of art to the consumer is almost zero. This is jarring to a lot of artists, but must be acknowledged if you expect to make money with your art in this cold commercial world.

If you build it, they won't come. If you build and market it, you have a chance.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

A quick note from the continuing Yahoo drama: today the company agreed to sell off Launchcast, its streaming music service, to CBS. (Disclosure: CBS is the publisher of News.com.) This continues Yahoo's movement out of the music biz--it sold its subscription service to RealNetworks back in February.

If it keeps going at this rate, CBS will have to add an ear to its logo.

More interesting than Yahoo's exit is the buyer. Launchcast now sits alongside Last.fm and AOL Radio (which is best-loved on the iPhone) in CBS's online radio arsenal. According to this report in All Things Digital, Launchcast will become more like AOL Radio, focusing primarily on pre-programmed playlists and Webcasts of terrestrial radio stations, while Last.fm will remain the company's flagship property for user-generated playlists.

It's interesting that CBS still sees a lot of opportunity in preprogrammed (top-down) online radio. By way of comparison, look at News Corp's recent launch of MySpace Music, which is focused on the idea that users will hunt down their favorite artists and songs and then assemble playlists (bottom up). CBS's approach makes sense--you might as well appeal to all segments of the listening audience, and some Internet users simply don't have the time to bother with custom playlists, or even with recommendation-driven services like Last.fm and Pandora.