“Big Girl (Your Are Beautiful)” by Mika

Here’s a little departure from the norm on this blog but I just had to put this up. If you haven’t seen this already you must. Great song. Great video!

Why You Should Have Your Songs Professionally Critiqued

When seeking commercial success, the best, most experienced songwriters have their songs critiqued by their peers and others in their networks they respect and trust. They know they are too close to their work to be objective about it. What’s more, when you pour long hours and hard work into anything you are less willing to admit to its flaws than you should be. You become emotionally invested in the song and have certainly lost the ability to judge the impression it will make on a listener the first time they hear it. Melodies start sounding too familiar and love for your own creation begins to become unconditional.

Artists spend a lot of wasted time, money and effort submitting songs to contests, licensing opportunities and label A&R departments. It’s wasted because if they had just gotten the feedback from other professionals in the field before they sent their song into a competitive situation they could have made some easy improvements and their song would have had a better chance of being chosen.

It takes a certain level of wisdom and sophistication on the part of the artist to seek out critiques. It’s hard to hear you need to go back to the drawing board, or that your song isn’t all you thought it was. It’s even harder if you’ve already poured a lot of money and other resources into getting a good production done only to be told you’ll likely have to do it again. This is all part of paying your dues. It also leads to learning that you might want to start getting feedback earlier in the process, i.e. before you have a song produced and mastered. Are your lyrics compelling? Is the hook catchy? Is it too repetitive? Should the cowbell start in the second verse or should you just bring it in for the bridge? Is the structure right? How could it be improved? These are the things you’ll learn.

You should get multiple opinions.

Another compelling reason to have your song professionally critiqued is that by doing so, you are likely engaging someone who has been successful in the music industry. Perhaps even someone who could know where your song should be placed or someone who has an opportunity for your song. Often times, engaging someone’s professional song critiquing services can lead to developing a broader relationship, songwriting partnerships and professional opportunities.

Should You Create Music Or Promote Yourself?

I get this question from time to time from bands and musicians who are seeking their big break.

The world of social media is so new and is changing so quickly that it’s hard to give an answer and it’s even harder to know if any answer will hold true tomorrow. At any rate, I had an email exchange this morning with a very talented artist who asked this question.

I told him that being an artist is hard enough without having to be the best self-promoter. In an ideal world, you would have a manager who is good at leveraging social media. But, since many artists have to do this on their own, I’d advise to do it in spurts. When you’re in creative mode you need to keep the network you’ve built active, but you should allow yourself to disconnect from making it grow while you work artistically. Then, when you have good material and you’re ready to push again, spend your time networking, promoting and growing your fan base.

In the end, you’ll attract fans because you have great music. That’s your goose that lays the golden eggs so don’t ever neglect that. Your ultimate goal is to leverage your social media efforts. You have to push really hard to get your fan base to a level where your fans are evangelizing your music and spreading it around, so your fan base grows when you’re not pushing it personally. It’s like a rocket. It takes 90% of the fuel to get it out of the pull of earth’s gravity, but then it can go to the moon and back on the 10% of the fuel it has left. If your music has what it takes you’ll get there sooner rather than later. Extremely compelling media (and that includes songs) will spread virally. Keep lighting matches and sooner or later one will light the forest on fire.

- My apologies to Californians for that metaphor. It’s painful just to see what you go through every summer.

The Future of the Music Industry – Part II

Read this article on The Huffington Post here.

“It’s not show friends. It’s show business. ” – Bob Sugar (Jay Moore): Jerry McGuire (1996)

What will happen to the major labels?

The labels were only ever going to survive as long as they remained the powerful gatekeepers between the artists and a mass audience. To the artists, they are like bouncers at an exclusive nightclub on a January night in Manhattan; you suck up to them while you seethe at them for making you stand out in the cold. The longer you wait, the more resentful you get (yeah, been there).

As I discussed here before, technology is making it possible for an artist to post their song on the Web and immediately make it available to everyone. However, there are still no great solutions for making “everyone” aware of your song and motivating them to go get it — even if you’re giving it away. The labels are still much better than anyone else at mass marketing music because they still have the necessary money, relationships and other resources to do it. Music consumption is on the rise but music “sales” are faltering, so over time the labels are draining their coffers and soon won’t be able to even mass market effectively. They will be relegated to making money on the value of their legacy catalog of music — licensing The Rolling Stones and U2 to film and other similar opportunities.

The label groups aren’t resting on their laurels however. They see the inevitable endgame approaching and they have decided to address the situation with a multi-pronged strategy in hopes of delaying the end of their traditional business model as long as possible.

1. They extract multi-million dollar fees from music start-up companies that want to license their catalog.

Over the past few years a lot of venture capital firms and angel investors have poured money into music start-up companies that either stream major label music over the Web or offer it for download. Just to get started, Warner Music Group, SonyBMG, EMI and Universal demand millions of dollars from these start-ups upfront. So, the money has been flowing from the venture capital firms to the start-ups right into the pockets of the major labels. In many cases, it then turns out that these start-up firms pay more money than their business models can support and they’re going belly up long before ever turning a profit. A high profile start-up in this space called Spiral Frog was the most recent victim of this type of death. An interesting article about that can be read here.

2. They take an equity stake in new music companies.

Sometimes the labels will forgo a multi-million dollar advance and will even invest money in a new company if they believe enough in the new business. Warner, for example invested $20 million into a music start-up called Lala despite previously having sued the company for copyright infringement. All four major label groups have taken a stake in MySpace Music. However, even these companies’ business models are considered to be flawed and headed for what the popular TechCrunch blog that covers this space calls the “dead pool”. Although it’s more than likely MySpace Music will figure something out before getting there due to being backed by NewsCorp.

3. They do 360 deals with artists

As discussed previously, this is where the labels take a much larger stake in the artists’ revenue streams than they used to. Not only do they collect when the artist sells music. They also collect when the artist sells concert tickets, does product endorsements and sells T-shirts and other merchandise.

Between these strategies and the strength of their catalogs, these companies will survive. But in all likelihood they will promote fewer new acts with new music. The risk to return ratio just won’t be as attractive as their catalog businesses.

EMI is a good example of how bad things have gotten for the majors. In 2007 it was purchased by a capital firm called Terra Firma, headed by Guy Hands. The company brought in former Google chief information officer Douglas Merrill to head up its digital strategy. This past month both Hands and Merrill exited after Terra Firma had to write down a $1.78 billion loss on their investment. Now, EMI is trying to right itself and figure out what to do going forward.

So this all boils down to the question; what do artists and songwriters have to do today to increase their prospects of making a living — if not a killing?

The good news is there are a lot of things artists can do. The bad news is that the days of exploding stardom are going the way of the CD and the major labels. Sure, they can get their 15 megabytes of fame doing something that gets lots of attention on YouTube or by getting caught up in a prostitution scandal with a sitting governor like Ashley Alexandra Dupre did. Then, she sold a bunch of her music on a DIY music sales site called AmieStreet. But that didn’t last. Her music wasn’t appealing enough to enough people to sustain a career in music. Of course, that’s not the path an artist will take if they’re serious about building long term fans and having a real career.

Today, artists and their managers have to do it all. They have to be their own promotion and marketing team. They have to network, build relationships and nurture their fans.

Most of all, they must come to terms with the fact that no one is going to invest their time and money into the artists’ music and careers unless they can see a path to getting a return on that investment. That path is still taking shape in the new music landscape; often referred to as Music 2.0. It’s still called show business and not show friends so investors have to have a stomach for risk. Artists can’t afford to be bitter about having to do it all themselves and I speak to many who unfortunately are. Artists and their managers have the most to gain in today’s business models and they get to keep a lot more of their rights and income than ever before. So, if they are diligent and their music is good they can earn a very decent living.

Online tools that artists can use are changing the landscape very quickly. Radiohead left their label and released their album on their own and used many online tools to track their own progress. A few weeks ago Counting Crows announced they too are leaving their label to go it alone. Granted, these are established bands with brand names. Few artists get to start out on their own with the same advantages but soon we are going to start seeing bands “breaking” all over the Web and bands and their managers need to especially make friends with analytic tools that will help them find their market and then focus like lasers on it.

These analytic services are going to be absolutely key to their future. They can’t get where they’re going if they don’t know where they’re starting from and they can’t correct their course if they aren’t able to see how (or if) their promotion and marketing efforts are working.

Nothing can replace good music, charisma, playing lots of gigs, having a good street team of fans who help artists spread the word and nurturing a growing fan base. However, there are so many tools now directly available to artists to help them do even these things that didn’t exist just a few years ago that leveraging them is a must if artists are going to succeed in the new landscape.

I’ll leave it here for now, but for good measure I’m throwing in a list of things artists should be doing and if you know any you can pass this list along:

First, they must get attention. Money will follow.

1. Artists should sign up to as many online social networks as possible where they can post theirs or their band’s profile and music. They need to network with fans and similar bands on those sites. They include but are not limited to:
a. MySpace
b. Facebook
c. iMeem
d. Broadjam
e. Mog
f. Reverb Nation

2. They need to get valuable feedback and analytic information on their music from focus groups and real industry professionals
a. SoundOut
b. Music Xray (my company)
c. They should use Google Analytics to measure activity on their website

3. They should submit their songs to real industry opportunities, song contests and gigs
a. SonicBids
b. Music Xray (still my company)
c. Great American Song Contest
d. International Songwriting Competition
e. John Lennon Songwriting Contest

4. They should distribute their music to all digital retail outlets
a. TuneCore
b. The Orchard
c. IODA Alliance
d. Reverb Nation

5. They should consider “pre-clearing” their music for sync licensing (like Getty Images but for songs)
a. Pump Audio (actually owned by Getty Images)
b. AudioSocket
c. Sir Groovy

6. They should consider placing their songs on sites that enable their fans to “pitch in” to fund their recording and marketing.
a. Sellaband
b. SliceThePie

7. Especially they should stay up to date on the new music space. There are some very good blogs and newsletters they should be reading.
a. Music Think Tank
b. Hypebot
c. Mog
d. Lefsetz Letter
e. MI2N

The Future of the Music Industry

Read this article on The Huffington Post here.

“In the race to adopt new technologies, the music industry historically has finished just ahead of the Amish.” – Stan Cornyn, former Warner Music Group executive

What is happening to the music industry?

In short, the traditional music industry has been beaten, battered and completely transformed by a perfect storm of new technologies. It actually started with the introduction of the CD back in 1982. Music was digitized and encoded on the CDs which we all bought to replace and enhance our vinyl collections. Then, along came the MP3 which enabled us to compress those CD song files down to manageable sizes and file sharing began. The next nail in the coffin of the traditional music industry was the emergence of MP3 players led by the iPod and digital retail led by iTunes. Once people became used to that, who wanted to carry around a CD case? Finally, the plummeting cost and decreasing technical knowledge required to make a decent sounding recording sounded the death knell for the major music labels, the backbone of the traditional music industry.

The music labels were society’s music filters. They were responsible for finding the best talent, nurturing it, promoting it and distributing it all over the world. But the labels were also incredibly inefficient. For each act they successfully promoted and on which they turned a profit, there were dozens, even hundreds of failed acts and artists in whom the labels had invested and had lost money. Few industries would have been able to operate with such numbers but the music industry had thrived under this system; mostly due to the large amounts of cash that were made with every success. With new technologies affecting almost every aspect of the ecosystem (from song creation to mass distribution) the labels could do little to prevent the demise of their business. Seeing opportunity before them, entrepreneurs emerged with ideas about how the whole industry could be run more efficiently.

Today, music is increasingly sold as digital files that you download to your computer and then put on your mobile device such as your iPod. Other services are increasingly enabling you to stream music on demand. Under that arrangement, you never actually own any music. You simply have access to all of it all the time. Physical music retail stores are going out of business and soon won’t exist as stand-alone shops.

Anyone can record and upload a song.

On the music creation side of the value chain, the cost of recording and producing a song has fallen through the floor. What used to cost tens of thousands of dollars and had to be done in a professional recording studio can now be done in a bedroom on a laptop computer. This is a great development that enables creative talent to emerge even in the absence of musical ability or even any musical knowledge. On the other hand, it has caused a veritable avalanche of new music to pour onto the web — much of it of dubious quality. Even the largest physical music stores couldn’t carry much more than 10,000 titles. That’s nothing compared to what’s now available at the click of a mouse. MySpace alone is said to host over 10 million acts. Other sites that cater to artists have hundreds of thousands of bands signed up to their services.

It is a jungle out there! How can the fans find the needles in the haystack they want to hear? How can the artists locate their future fans? It’s the fundamental problem the labels were solving but now they can’t do it effectively. There’s too much music for them to even try to filter effectively and nobody wants to buy their CDs anyway, so how can that work even be funded? The sale of digital files isn’t even coming close to compensating for the loss of revenue on the sale of physical goods so now there’s much less money to compensate for the labels’ inherent inefficiencies. In fact, most insiders believe recorded music will cease to be paid for by the end consumer. It will instead either be free (built into the cost of marketing other products) or built into the cost of other services you pay for such as your Internet and cable TV bill or your mobile phone service. It will feel free and the actual revenue generated from the distribution of recorded music will be a fragment of what it has been historically. So, where does that leave us?

Fortunately, it’s all going to be OK. There are dozens of emerging companies that are taking on these challenges and there are some really good ideas. It’s interesting to see the variety of approaches. Most agree that the currency of exchange for recorded music will be the attention of the fans instead of their money. If an artist can get attention they will be able to sell tickets to their shows, license songs to soundtracks and get money for endorsing products. The labels held the key to getting access to big opportunities but now the artists and their managers have to find other avenues.

In spite of the reduced barriers to music creation and access to easily have your song distributed to all of the digital outlets (see services such as TuneCore or The Orchard) it still almost always requires mass exposure in order for a song to really take hold and begin to earn some money. That means that once a song is created, it still requires enormous effort, time and resources to “push” and promote that song within the industry. Songs must still come to the attention of someone who has an opportunity. The gatekeepers, such as music supervisors in Hollywood, ad agencies, program directors and video game designers remain and will continue to remain in place playing a valuable role.

So, real change will come by leveling the playing field and by giving individual artists equal access to mass-exposure opportunities. This is the challenge we’re trying to solve with our new Music Xray service. (Pardon the plug but I can’t describe the solutions to the industry’s toughest challenges without describing our own solution since it represents our best thinking and thus my opinion).

Think of Music Xray as a kind of YouTube for songs in that each Music Xray represents one song. Each Music Xray get s a unique URL (just like a YouTube video) and each Music Xray can be embedded elsewhere around the web (again, just like a YouTube video). But that’s where the comparison with YouTube ends because a Music Xray is more than just an embeddable song player. Each Music Xray comes with a stack of modules that open and close (see here) and each module contains specific information about the song, such as its lyrics, how many times it is mentioned on Twitter, in blogs, how many times it is traded on peer to peer networks, what it’s market potential is, what kind of license under which the song is available, what other songs it sounds like, among much other information. In addition to providing all of this information to the song owner (and anyone else they want to share it with), having so much information on each song allows us to provide a free filtering engine to the entire song buying music industry.

Imagine you’re an advertising executive and you want to license a song for your next ad campaign. You want something that sounds like “Brown Sugar” by Rolling Stones, which has 130 beats per minute, has the words “Russian roulette” in the lyrics, that has at least a 50% chance of becoming successful in a particular market, that already has a growing number of fans and an available license. The filtering system at Music Xray will soon provide that level of detail and that level of filtering ability. It will be a revolution in how that part of the business operates.

The important thing for artists is to have their music in databases of this sort. The one at Music Xray is particularly attractive because it will be open to anyone in the industry who wants to leverage Music Xray’s search capabilities. For a song owner, having their song in the Music Xray database will make it discoverable by anyone and reduces the work artists must do to promote their music within the industry once they’ve recorded it. It also reduces the work that music supervisors have to do when filtering hundreds of songs for each opportunity.

How will music consumption work?

From the music fan’s perspective, music recommendation engines will become a ubiquitous part of our lives, and not just for music and entertainment products but for many consumer goods and services. You’ve seen the ads for Angie’s List which compiles and features customer reviews of household and professional services. Amazon has been recommending books and other products for years based on what others with consumption habits similar to yours have purchased. This is just the beginning of where recommendations and “relevancy filtering” is going.

The best recommendation systems will be very sophisticated. They will expose you to enough of the “familiar” for you to feel like the system “gets” you and understands your tastes. They will expose you to enough of the “new” for you to feel like you are growing and evolving in your own unique direction. They will also keep you sufficiently in tune with your peers and with those who are like you for you to feel like you belong to a larger collective. They will know the difference between you at age 25 and you at age 45 and they will know which products you buy for yourself and which you purchase as gifts for others — an important distinction for companies when making future recommendations.

There are a number of problems for the music industry to sort out but things are taking shape. One thing for certain is that the fans will not suffer. There is now and there will continue to be more music available than ever before and it will become easier to find and enjoy. It will cost less and more artists will earn a living making it.