Yesterday, I compiled my list of the five most welcome products for digital audio that came out in 2009. Today, I'm following it up with my list of the year's five biggest digital audio duds.
An image from the infamous online commercial for Songsmith, Microsoft's reverse-karaoke software.
(Credit: Microsoft)Zookz. The breathless pitch got me interested: a mysterious online service was getting ready to compete against subscription-based download service eMusic. But where eMusic limits users to a set number of downloads, this mystery service would offer unlimited music and movie downloads. How could this be? Wouldn't users just download all the material they wanted then cancel their subscriptions? How could content owners let this happen?
The trick: Zookz was based in Antigua, and according to the company, this meant it wasn't subject to those silly little things known as U.S. copyright laws and royalty rates. Unfortunately, the country of Antigua didn't agree, and days after the public beta launched, Zookz disappeared into the digital ether with a promise to refund subscribers' money.
Jango Artist Airplay. I liked Jango's online radio service back when it launched in 2007. This year, in what looked like a desperate bid for new revenue, the company launched a service called Artist Airplay, in which bands could pay for placement on appropriate Jango stations. While Jango's CEO tried to tell me this was a reasonable new marketing opportunity, I saw it as a new form of the old pay-for-play deal that beginning bands often fall for.
With regular marketing, everybody pays more or less the same amount for the same class of services and the music sinks or swims on its own merits. With pay-for-play, artists buy exposure. There's only one problem: the resulting conflict of interest drives discerning listeners--including people who might actually pay you for your music--away. Jango Artist Direct may not be as stark as those pay-to-play "showcases" and "band battles" where all the audience members are other bands and their friends, but I believe it's better for beginning artists never to start down this slippery slope. Then again, I thought users would never be ignorant enough to click on search advertisements in massive numbers, which is one reason why Sergey Brin and Larry Page are multibillionaires and I'm not.
Vevo. As long as we're talking about Google, let's talk about YouTube, which the search company owns. It's a great source for music videos, and its APIs have formed the basis for music-finding apps like Muziic and TubeRadio. Users love it. Unfortunately, the companies and artists who own the copyrights to many of those music videos don't love it--the videos are expensive to produce, and the ad revenues from YouTube and other online video sites are scanty to nonexistent. Google is also lukewarm about music videos on YouTube, finding that the cost of policing copyright and complying with take-down notices is more than the money they can earn from selling ads.
In December, two record companies--Sony and Universal--joined together with Google in a new joint venture, Vevo, to address the problem. This was supposed to be a back-end business-to-business kind of deal, where YouTube users wouldn't know (or care) that certain videos were actually being provided exclusively by Vevo, which would sell short video advertisements to run before them. Unfortunately, the glittery launch party drew undue attention to Vevo's own site, causing its servers to buckle under the load. The entire episode left music fans scratching their heads.
Songsmith. The idea wasn't all that bad. Karaoke is fun. Making music on computers is fun. So why not, reasoned some Microsoft researchers, create a program that fills in audio accompaniment as users sing. Unfortunately, the $29.95 price and unbelievably mockable promotional video turned Songsmith into an Internet laughingstock. Later videos featuring Songsmith's accompaniment to the vocal tracks of songs like Queen's "We Will Rock You" and Van Halen's "Running With the Devil" highlighted the silliness.
CMX. In August, reports broke that the four major record labels were considering a new type of "digital album" format that would include album art, lyrics, and extra content. There was just one problem: Apple was already building its own competing format, code-named Cocktail and eventually released as iTunes LP. I think the entire concept of a digital album is weird anyway: I'm not convinced that lack of album art is a big reason why users are buying singles instead of albums. (The real reason is the Chumbawamba factor, or the fact that a lot of albums contain only one or two good songs.) And iTunes LP doesn't exactly seem to be taking off, although some of the extras--outtakes and videos--are actually quite valuable. But creating a competing format that wouldn't be supported by Apple? That's just plain dumb. To be fair, we haven't heard anything about CMX since iTunes LP launched. Here's hoping this product is killed before it's ever born.
Jango CEO Dan Kaufman posted a long response to my post criticizing Jango Artist Airplay as a pay-for-play scheme that artists should avoid. (He also e-mailed me with contact info, so I'm fairly sure it's him, although the usual caveats apply.) It's a thoughtful comment, and Dan comes across as a serious businessperson, not a fly-by-night scam artist.
The question isn't whether you're serious enough to spend money on promotion, but whether Jango is the place to spend it.
(Credit: Jango)To summarize, Jango is trying to maintain a quality experience for listeners by making sure they're not inundated with Airplay artists they're not going to like. Rather than playing Airplay artists based strictly on how much money they contribute, Jango screens them all to make sure they meet some sort of quality bar. A similarity algorithm is applied, so you won't be hearing some random rap artist between The Cure and The Smiths. If a listener hates a particular song, he'll never hear it again. Artists who score poorly across the board are removed from rotation entirely and their money is refunded. Perhaps most important, Jango will only play an Airplay artist no more than once every 20 songs, so at least 95 percent of the music you hear will be music you explicitly want to hear.
All good for listeners. But from an artist's perspective, it still smells like pay-for-play. If Jango is screening Airplay entrants anyway, why make them pay? Why not just open Jango radio to emerging artists who the editors think are good enough? And how does Jango decide who needs to pay and who gets in for free? Do you have to be signed to a record label to get on Jango for free? What about independent artists who are suddenly the subject of a lot of searches at the Jango home page? (Probably not--too easy to game.) Where's the line?
I understand that every company needs revenue, but there's a difference between companies that charge a flat fee for a particular service, and a company that discriminates downward by charging only those artists who can least afford it. CD Baby, TuneCore, and nearly every other company that caters to independent artists has a standard price list--if you're going through them, you're paying the same fee or percentage, no matter who you are or how popular you become. They have enough faith in the value of their service that they can set a universal price and watch the money roll in (or not).
The biggest red flag for me comes when Dan mentions artists who are "serious enough about their career to spend money on promotion." As a musician, I heard variations on this theme all the time and it drove me nuts: "You've got to spend money to make money"; "You've got to invest in your career."
No kidding? Ask any musician how much money they've spent over the years on musical gear, rehearsal space, recording equipment, studio time, CD manufacturing, mailing envelopes to radio stations and labels, building Web sites, registering domain names, printing fliers, paying people to hang those fliers, paying club fees (sound guy, security) out of their take of the door, and on and on and on. We all spend plenty of money, thanks. The trick is spending it wisely. While still spending most of your time and energy making music that doesn't suck.
Again: marketing is important. Marketing isn't free. But I still think a musician's best bet is to use time-tested services that charge the same amount for everybody, and then let your music sink or swim on its own. If nobody's buying, and nobody's offering you gigs, then accept that you're playing music for your own personal benefit, not as a career. And maybe in another year or another band, you'll find that the situation has changed.
Perhaps Jango will prove me wrong and manage to grow user traffic and unlock a great new revenue stream at the same time. I'll look forward to hearing updates as the program continues.
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Yes, beginning bands need to do some marketing, and sometimes this requires an outlay of money.
In the old days, it was going to Kinko's to print fliers and postcards for your mailing list. Now it's registering a domain name, building your own Web site, or establishing an online store to sell downloads, CDs, and merchandise (though there are more and more ways to do this with no money up front, like Audiolife and Routenote).
There's a slippery slope between these necessary expenses and one of the oldest scams in the music industry: pay-for-play. The idea's been around ever since there have been kids in garages who want a quick and easy path to rock stardom, and there are many variations on the theme: meaningless "showcases" or "battles of the bands" that are open to anybody who pays an entry fee, requirements for the performer to buy a big block of tickets to resell, services that place your songs on "compilation" CDs that are supposedly sent to record labels or radio stations, complicated online multilevel marketing schemes...if you can think of it, it's been done.
Earlier this week, Jango introduced a new program called Artist Airplay that offers a very straightforward proposition: the more you pay, the more you'll get played on Jango's Web radio stations. If enough listeners vote that they like you, you'll get placed into regular rotation.
Forget for a moment whether payola is fair to music listeners. Payola--like other forms of pay-for-play--is bad for artists. Even if your music's great, the conflict of interest makes you suspect. If you were any good, couldn't you get noticed some other way? (Of course, the original payola was conducted in secret, which eliminated listeners' ability to make this distinction. That's why it's illegal.)
The inherent conflict in pay-for-play is why the audience at those gigs consists of the band's friends, people bribed with cheap drinks, and the other bands who are also waiting to play--not music fans who actually buy music and go to lots of shows. That's why those "compilation" CDs go immediately from the envelope to the trash can--not into heavy rotation or an artist and repertoire agent's office.
In the case of Jango, listeners now know that some portion of the music they're hearing was selected not because an editor liked it, not because some algorithm calculated its similarity with other songs, not because it was popular with other listeners who have similar tastes, but simply because the artist paid for it.
This tarnishes the entire service with a distinct air of "suck"--which is too bad, since I actually liked Jango when I tried it a little more than a year ago. Who'd pay for that kind of exposure? I know that times are hard, and Web radio needs new sources of revenue, but asking musicians to pony up for plays is no way to build a serious, long-lasting business.
Here's the deal, musicians: if you want to make a living playing music, somebody should be paying you for your music. Not the other way around. If nobody's buying, consider it a hobby, not a career.
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