Photo: digital vincent/flickr.

Mr. Owl, How many clicks does it take to get to the rock n’ roll center of a retail mp3?

Let’s find out. A One… A two-HOO…too many!

Mr. Owl just BitTorrented right into your album because it was easier than buying it on iTunes. It took less clicks.

Jay Frank suggested counting “clicks to content.” iTunes and Amazon send you through more than 10 clicks if you don’t already have an account but P2P takes only four clicks on average, he said. Streaming takes one or two. Think YouTube or Google, who nailed it with OneBox—the player that appears in their search results. “Anything more than two clicks and you’re missing out on the majority”, said Frank, “Impress them fast.”

Ariel Hyatt asked NMS attendees to raise their hands if they’ve ever bought their own songs on iTunes. The crowd was split but most hadn’t. She used the analogy of cooking: you wouldn’t serve food to guests without tasting it first, would you?

“Make it easy to buy” said Tony Van Veen. Have “compelling offers” such as package deals or name-your-price, and “take away the fear of buying” with a money-back guarantee. He told the story about an 80s band (I forget the name of the band but please comment if you know it) who recently sold their entire back catalog + their entire future catalog + free entry to any of their shows forever all for $100. For a superfan that’s a compelling deal.

Ripping and Burning > P2P

Eric Garland and Tom Silverman talked about the so-called problem with illegal downloads. If it’s hosted on an upload site like RapidShare, then “there is a place we can bomb”, said Silverman, “but not with P2P.” Research showed that more music is actually ripped/burned than it is shared via P2P.

Bombing the service provider is no solution when “people and their insatiable appetite for free music are the real problem.” –Eric Garland, CEO, BigChampange.

The desire for free music isn’t going away. Don’t blame the consumer. Musicians need to find ways to work free into their strategy. e.g. Free downloads for email addresses. Use free to convert strangers into fans. Tony Van Veen said, “Free music is the way to do it. Aggressively offer free. Do swaps. Use P2P. …Don’t fear free. …Build your list. …Don’t be afraid to steal a good idea and make it your own.”

Photo: matthileo/flickr

“Why make your own website? You own it. You own the experience.” –Chris Vinson, Founder, Bandzoogle.

Since before you heard of Google, Chris Vinson has been designing musician websites. Like many today, he was in a band that needed a website. He did what anyone with enough determination would have done—he built it. 1000+ people were on his email list before email was a staple. Based on the success of his band’s site, he was later hired by his record label to build hundreds more. In 2004, he launched Bandzoogle—now a comprehensive, subscription, website platform for musicians.

“Decide an important action and encourage fans to do that action.”

Tracking website analytics for years, Vinson has concluded that “elaborate sites lose traffic.” Simple is better. Having a complicated, all-Flash website is self-defeating. “Flash sucks” was rule #1 in his 18-minute intensive at NMS about ‘how to make an artist website that rocks.’ He echoed these rules and really drove the idea of having exactly one concept per page. Have one call to action—e.g. ‘download this’ or ‘become a fan on Facebook.’

There are three phases according to Vinson: Attract fans from social networks a.k.a. “outposts.” Engage them with a “compelling fan experience.” Sell through simple calls to action. “Artist websites emphasize an artist’s own brand.” Make it personal. “Frequent updates = repeat visits.”

Bandzoogle founder Chris Vinson explains how to make an artist website that rocks. Photo: virtualmusictv/flickr

Brand isn’t something you sell. It’s not schilling other people’s products, and it’s not selling out. Brand is what you stand for.” –Liz Leahy, Co-Founder, Section 101.

What about fan mailing lists? What’s the right frequency? Ariel Hyatt suggests one email per month. Each should contain a single call to action—a different call to action each month. Disc Makers CEO Tony Van Veen said, “Retain mindshare. Don’t let them forget about you.” and “Add value in your communication.” Everything you do online is communication and should reflect your brand vision.

Bonus Tracks:
08. TinEye—reverse image search.
09. Twitcaps—real-time Twitter image search.
10. Twipho—search twitpic.com, img.ly and yfrog.com.

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities. (collaborativeconsumption.com)

Short on time? Here’s the ultra-hip 2-min version:

1. K.I.S.S.

Keep it simple, stupid! Forget the frills and the cheap thrills. Focus on the heart of the matter.

Flickr, help me help you. Considering the volume photos uploaded to Flickr, the recent search should be nearly realtime, right? But it’s only useful if the results are relevant/related. How can the search situation be made less out of focus? Tags play a major role in the search results—a user can tag their own photos and they can also tag their contacts’ photos. But how does Flickr address the issue of someone overtagging photos with popular keywords? Is it an issue? Flickr Groups, Favorites, and total views also add to the search mix—but how? Do backlinks and embeds get factored in? Ideas?

What features would you want in your favorite band’s mobile app?

Now I like autoplay on YouTube because I know it’s coming and how to control it, but on official band sites and MySpace or Facebook pages, I think it’s too in-your-face, it looks amateur, and it’s disrespectful to your visitors. The way I see it, here are the pros and cons of autoplaying audio:

Having the option to play audio may increase user engagement, but I think forcing it does the opposite—it decreases quality engagement. Besides, if you really want to engage your website visitors, then use video (in a highly visible part of the page with autoplay turned off).

Ultimately, the decision is a matter of taste. Bottom line—if you have a really good reason to turn autoplay on, then do it, but don’t do it because “everyone else is doing it” or because you think you need it to compete. Before turning autoplay on, ask yourself, do I want to send some of my potential fans into orbit? Or better yet, ask, what is my reason for turning autoplay on?

Thumbnail Photo: johnnyvulkan/flickr

Tagging (-verb): Applying a word or phrase as a label or means of description.
Tagaholic (-noun): A person who gets more than cheap thrills from tagging.

As a self-professed tag-a-holic I’m pretty stoked about the news, and especially so because I had emailed them suggesting a tagging feature. Bandcamp artists can now list themselves in up to five genres, they can add their location, and they can add specific traits to individual tracks in the form of tags. Adding the genre and location isn’t that groundbreaking on its own (almost all music sites have this to some degree) but this feature is positioning Bandcamp towards an indie music discovery community. When you click on the tags/genres/locations you can see all the other artists or tracks tagged the same way. There’s not a set list of tags that you are confined too either—you can describe your music how you see fit. I’ve written before about how I think Bandcamp is the best way to represent an indie artist’s music online. I’ve already discovered some new artists by just browsing through the tags, and because the presentation is so ace, it just makes you want to press play.

Bandcamp’s Tag Cloud on Day 1. bandcamp.com/tag

Bandcamp seems to grasp the importance of maintaining their already-superb platform but it’s great to see they’re continuing to fine-tune and add new features. I think the addition of more community features on Bandcamp like commenting (or fan reviews) would be welcomed, and in case not, they could leave it up to each artist whether they want to allow commenting on their tracks via having an option in their artist settings. Comments or fan reviews under each track remind me of Amie Street’s Rec’s which IMO in my opinion is that site’s best and most engaging feature. There you have to download (buy) the track to recommend (review) it. Another potential community-driver could be digg-like voting. However it’d be smart for Bandcamp to take things one step at a time and be sure to continue to deliver its core features as a service for bands.

Community Overload?

There is an abundance of online music communities, but there’s not many sites that offer the high-quality DIY service that Bandcamp does, and there’s room for them to keep advancing there too. Last year they added sales of physical goods. I’d like to see them add embeddable mailing list sign-up widgets—they already collect emails with downloads for you so this seems like an easy feature extension that would make them more of an all-in-one service for musicians. Or they could somehow integrate with YouTube or Ustream to have video on the Bandcamp page/storefront/channel/station (or however you want to call it). What’s your take on these ideas? I don’t think I’d go as far as having listeners create profiles—who needs another profile, right? I’d try to find a way to let people interact through a service that lets them login with their existing online profiles. In yesterday’s blog post on the tagging, Bandcamp says they originally had “no desire to create another online music community.”

Because there are so many other music sites, one can see what works, what flops, and and try to understand why. I don’t know if any of you have followed the story about TheSixtyOne’s recent redesign. TheSixtyOne is an indie music community where “new artists make music and listeners decide what’s good.” Think indie radio + voting + discussion + digital store. Last month they did a major redesign of the site with no warning and upset a lot of their users. The new design is what I call euro-style and looks cool but the community features are less prevalent. I give them credit for trying something new but they should have communicated the upcoming changes better with their uses. If they did, they might have realized that their users care more about the community than flashy design.

It’s All About The Data

Bandcamp’s new tagging should go over well. It’s subtle but powerful. I even think everyone would benefit more if Bandcamp takes this one step further by enabling the users (listeners) to tag tracks. We’ve seen that crowdsourced-tagging approach before on other music sites—Last.fm and Amie Street come to mind—and it’s a fun way to create data that engages fans (because they have to think about your music as they tag). Tag. Tag. Tag. I’m a tagging freak. I don’t try to organize, I just tag. I tag in excess because it makes things easier to find later. See, I can’t even help but over-tag my blog posts (you’re supposed to use at most 10 tags). My Delicious bookmarks total 7000+ tags. I’m not alone either. Widely-used social bookmarking apps like Delicious, Xmarks, and Google Bookmarks hold the tag data created by thousands and thousands of users. Combine all that and you’ve got a helluva lot of data to crunch. It’s like using humans to crawl the web instead of search bots. Humans zone in on content and label it in a way that’s effective and meaningful for, well, humans. Delicious is essentially a crowdsourced search engine. They provide a great service but they’ve failed to innovate. They’re owned by Yahoo. They have the data, but they don’t leverage it in their apps.

Back to music—think about how Last.fm powers its similar artists based on listener behavior. Think about combining listener behavior with crowdsourced tagging could make recommendation engines. Multiple tag queries or basic seach operators would be great for filtering by genre and location simultaneously—e.g. electronica + new york—but I wouldn’t stop at genre and location—I’d try to encourage mood tags and sounds-like tags too. If Bandcamp collected tag data from everyone they could better use it analyze trends and could bring their upcoming search that they mention to a whole new level. I hope they attempt to deliver more in the way of music analytics and music intelligence.

Read more posts tagged Bandcamp here.

Multitouch makes “sense.”

The idea of multitouch sensors has been around for years, but multitouch has yet to see wide-spread implementation in computers. I think it’s coming. I think a wave of multitouch operating systems is going to redefine how we interact with computers. But I think they’ll be touchscreens and gesture-based systems too. I mean after getting used to the iPhone’s touchscreen, I’ve noticed that I want to touch my computer screen sometimes to move things etc. Anyone else catch themselves doing that?

Touch by chrisevans

Computing needs to be intuitive.

Computing needs to be more intuitive. UI advances will address that. Our brain’s hard wiring is capable of a lot more that pointing a mouse—we need to give it the chance to be more creative and boundless. By using our hands differently, with more intuitive movements, we’ll be helping our mind work more naturally. It will make a better fit between the brain and the computer by way of the body. One day we might we have chips that connect to our brain energy, right? Our brain is a super computer, right?

It all relies on intuitive design. Pranav Mistry talked about intuitive interface design in his SixthSense technology presentation. It virtually connects us to the computer via our gestures. According to Mistry, “We are looking for an era where computing will actually merge with the physical world.” Think about the games and apps we could make with that. While not nearly to the extent of SixthSense technology, Nintendo’s Wii is somewhat based on gesture recognition but the player has to hold the controller which recognizes movements in 3 dimensions. The Wii is essentially a wireless mouse with an extra dimension—it’s fun but I wouldn’t characterize it as intuitive. Even still, it’s extremely popular.

Dhani Harrison is a musician in his own right—his indie-rock band thenewno2 is featured in Rock Band with songs from their debut album, You Are Here. Note—any musician will soon be able to publish their tracks in Rock Band too via the Rock Band Network. In a Billboard.com interview Dhani said, “I did everything I could to not be a musician…I went to university (Brown), I worked as a designer, I competed in Olympic sport (rowing)…and I ended up being a musician. It’s in the DNA, I guess.”

But as Dhani explains to Conan, his paying job is designing videogames, and I suspect the music-gaming community is pretty happy with his efforts so far in making The Beatles Rock Band as genuine and fun as possible. His enthusiasm towards creating the game and his dedication to historical accuracy no doubt played an important role. Outside of the videogame, Dhani is striving to build a unique community for thenewno2 fans with their new website designed to deliver personal interactive video content via subscription and without depending on networks like Facebook or MySpace. In an article on Wired.com Scott Thill summarized, “The plan is comparatively simple: Compress and feed thenewno2’s output on video directly to its fan base, and they will come to support the artists and build a community.” In the same article Dhani told Wired, “Rather than have fans just leave comments on MySpace, they can have a personal connection to the band. When they see my profile live on the site, they can literally click me and ask me a question or two. It’s interactive blogging, but we also wanted to bring that actual visual context.” Now here’s some Rock Band action—Yomp by thenewno2:

This post is a follow-up from yesterday when we posted video footage of The Beatles Rock Band. You can see more articles about Rock Band at here. VirtualMusic.tv is seeking writers interested in music videogames and other topics. Please see our about page.

DepecheMode.com brings us the expected features of a band website, and then some. The site is photo-rich and packaged in layers of sleek design. The tour tracker adds interactivity by letting fans share their concert experience via messages posted by map location and photos uploaded to an immense fan gallery.

Photos posted by the band at each tour location can be seen in the tour blog. I only wish it were easier to sort and share the photos by location and date. The tour blog updates are not included in their RSS feed and they lack permalinks but the band does post them on Twitter @depechemode. I would like to see them integrate commenting to both the tour blog and the news feed.

Depeche Mode is currently on their Tour of the Universe and they are compiling a Universe of the Fans in a fan mosaic comprised of fan photos. “The more photos are uploaded, the more clearly visible Dave, Andrew and Martin will be.” One can zoom in on the mosaic to see the individual photos.

The downloads page includes two Depeche Mode iPhone applications—one free and one paid—but they lack integration with the more interactive features of the site. I would like to see a free app that extends fan involvement to the mobile environment by allowing mobile fan uploads and geotagging as opposed to the existing free app that contains sound samples, tour dates, and iTunes links. The paid app is meant to let fans remix the songs from Depeche Mode’s latest album, Sounds of the Universe.

Depeche Mode in Lima, Peru on their 2009 Tour of the Universe / flickr.com/photos/jos_ec/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Music SOTM Series: Do you know a band, DJ, or musician with an ace website? Please let us know at design@virtualmusic.tv and we’ll consider it for Music SOTM. Entries are based on interactive content, fan engagement, and mobility. Visit virtualmusic.tv/msotm/ to see more MSOTM artists.