1. High-Octane Friend-Filtered Content

The voices of consumessegers are magnified by the network. Facebook’s upgraded social plugins (e.g. the epic like button integration) are putting fan-driven music into overdrive by making it easier to share your likes with your friends. Take a look at likebutton.me when you’re logged into Facebook and you’ll find an aggregation of your friends likes. Ask yourself, what is it that people share on the web? The answer is better content. Whether it’s entertainment or information, people tend to share the content that they regard as better a.k.a. worth sharing. A lot of shared content comes from mainstream sources, however—like unknown awesome bands—there is plenty of awesome less-discovered content. With the new like button integration, Facebook is changing the mentality around sharing—it’s as easy as liking now. They’ve made it extremely easy to share. The outcome of this is higher-octane friend-filtered content which should help us discover the best content out there.

2. Different Strokes For Different Folks

For some, music is a career, for others it’s recreation, and many players feel stuck in the middle of the spectrum like a pedestrian on a highway median. The overall music scene is expanding and becoming more diverse genre-wise. There’s enough lanes for a steady flow, and that stuck feeling is mostly mental. Music selection is heading towards infinity. Listeners want what listeners want—each has their own taste—but they have to be exposed to it first (unless they decide to create it instead). Is there maximum amount of creativity in the world? Hell no! The roadblocks of physical world don’t always exist on the web. They are a mirage. But everyone sees from a different perspective. When you stop squinting and open your eyes wide, do you see the open road, of a traffic jam?

3. Fans Behind The Wheel

It all starts with a few people who believe in something to the point that they are motivated to share it with their friends. These fans create ignition sparks by influencing their friends. Who’s controlling the music-industry steering wheel now? It’s the fans who dominate social media and communication.

4. Where’s The Free Petrol?

Chris Anderson in 2008: From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you. (Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business)

7:30 Kevin Breuner: I find myself kind of caught in the middle of that being an artist myself who is making music and putting it out there for sale. but at the same time, someone passes me a band that I’ve never heard of, and technically it might be illegal to download the tracks. But at the same time I’m thinking I wasn’t going to buy it anyway, it didn’t cost them anything to get me this copy, and I might actually show up to a show because of it. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

8:00 Chris Anderson: Every band that puts there music on MySpace, which is to say every band, is on some level volunteering to give their music away for free in one form to drive demand for the others. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

9:10 Chris Anderson: Free music has been part of music for as long as there’s been radio. Radio is free music. No one—I don’t know of anyone—who objects to their music being played on radio, even though they may often get no money from that, because they understand the marketing value. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

Kevin Breuner in 2009: The future of music lies completely within the artist’s hands, period. If they want to focus on selling recorded music and their fan base will continue to buy it, selling music will be a big revenue stream for them. If they are fantastic live and want to give away a track to entice people to come to a show, then live shows may be their big revenue stream, but it’s all up to the artist and what their fan base will allow. The future of the music business is NOT in the hands of companies who dream up business models that artist should follow. The future is NOT free music because some guy with a degree and years working in the industry says so. The business plays by the artist’s rules now, and that scares the pants off the gatekeepers that used to make a living deciding what the artists could do. (Music will be free + Touring is where the money is = BS!)

Digital freebies are essentially a free source of advertising, but only if there’s a method behind it. For example, there’s giving away an mp3 in exchange for an email address. Why’s email important? Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin Media (an avant-garde service for midstream–mainstream musicians), reported that close to one-third of their artists’ revenue is driven through email alone and stressed the importance of “being where the fans are.” But here’s a question—does a single fan today account for more, or less, net revenue in the long run? What free tactics do you have packed in your trunk?

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.

Social Rocks.

The stage is lit—music has always been social, and the web continues to make it even more so. Communication is on the rise. People want to share and “everyone who shares is an influencer.” Music discovery is powered by your friends and by recommendation engines—the technology is only getting smarter, and, in their case, everyone who listens is an influencer. Web apps like Blip.fm and Twisten.fm rely nearly entirely on friend-powered playlists and realtime recommendations. Music streamers crave sharing, simplicity, and depths of controls for customizing their listening experiences.

Shareability and community spin music in the social web. Pandora and Last.fm’s widely popular iPhone apps encourage users to share songs they like with their friends as they’re listening to them. Grooveshark’s web interface heavily encourages sharing, and its integration with Twitter via Twisten.fm and Tinysong have helped fuel its rapid growth in 2009. Nearly all of today’s free (ad-supported) streaming sites include links to purchase mp3′s via iTunes or Amazon. Vevo has them, but, YouTube—arguably the largest and most engaging music streaming site—does not.

The Delicious user base has a relatively high concentration of developers, designers, techies, nerds, etc.—individuals likely to have above-average internet savvy. As a group they are an acute filter for quality content. The chart below shows the popularity of the same music websites based on data from Delicious. You can see there is some divergence from the traffic heat map. The most notable difference is MySpace Music, which showed the highest website traffic, but shows the lowest Delicious rank. Pandora is the top-bookmarked music site on Delicious by far, with last.fm second, and Grooveshark climbing quickly. Pandora is also the top-ranked music site on Xmarks.

Musicians—many are at the center of the social mix lifecasting on Twitter, Ustream, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace. They’re communicating like never before, and evolving the industry. Revenue comes in new forms. The urge to be “indie” is contagious. The amplifiers are on.

Mobility Rolls.

Seven of the top twelve are radio/streaming apps. But smartphones are not just for listening to music. Gigzee is an events app—a location-aware tool for finding shows/concerts in your area. With more people on smartphones, more people can take advantage of location-based services like this. Music creation apps like Virtuoso Piano, Drum Kit, freestyle, NLog Synth, Digidrummer, Looptastic, and Jamble Music Mashups are wildly popular. Every human is an artist in some way—as technology improves more people will find themselves creating, and collaborating remotely. Who’s at center stage now? Creative Commons-released music encourages open remixing via sites like JamGlue, ccMixter, Indaba Music, Jamendo, SoundCloud, and more. Maybe influenced by NIN, many musicians are releasing audio source files for open remixing, fan remix contests, remix apps, or fan music videos.

Mood-based technology might zap us to better understand how music relates to human emotions. In their press release, Syntonetic says they’ve “cracked the emotional codes found in music to create an intelligent system that deciphers every musical property in a song, including moods and emotions, as well as musical genres and sub-genres, styles, tempo/beat, vocals, instruments and production features.” The way I see it, we’re only on the brink of emotion technology. App enthusiast Diego Balbuena says, “I do think that these type of programs can be the next killer app” but he stresses the importance of the apps being human-like. The more users that use the app, the more data they’ll have, and the better the algorithms will be. Happiness is a warm iPhone.