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What Do Qtrax, Spiral Frog & Maxim Magazine Have in Common?

June 27, 2007 at 8:18 am · Filed under Uncategorized, CRB, Qtrax, Ad supported music

The answer is Lance Ford (the man who brought Maxim to the US) and Robin Kent (former CEO of Universal McCann). Together they run an ad sales rep firm called Rebel Digital. Both Lance & Robin were part of the management team at Spiral Frog, but left after a mysterious managerial blow out and formed Rebel Digital. Unlike Spiral Frog, which only managed to license content from 2 of the 4 majors, Qtrax announced yesterday that they have licensed content from all 4 majors.

For those of you who don?t know, Qtrax is a P2P music service supported by advertising. So the fact that the ex-McCann CEO and the guy who helped generate $400 million in advertising for Maxim over 5 years are helping sell advertising is pretty exciting.

Furthermore, the New York Post reports that the parent company of Qtrax (Brilliant Technologies) plans to spin Qtrax out and take it public. If investors bite, Qtrax may have a war chest of cash to pay for licenses and wait for one of the most credible ad sales teams around to grow their ad supported music business.

While I?m personally excited to see serious contenders in the ad supported music on demand arena (Go Rukus! Go We7! Go iMeem!), I also love the idea that Rebel Digital is a separate ad rep. If Lance and Robin can successfully build an advertising business for Qtrax, they can easily extend that business to folks like Rukus, iMeem or any other innovative new ad supported music concept. Rooting for Rebel Digital is rooting for the success of ad supported music. Oh, and while you?re at it, put in a hurrah for Ronning Lipset Radio. Their work is essential to helping Internet radio survive ridiculous CRB rulings.

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Pandora Party?

May 9, 2007 at 7:12 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Like so many others, I recently received an invitation to a mysterious party at Pandora. I?ve heard tons of rumors swirling around the reason for the meeting. The worst rumor I?ve heard is that Pandora has decided to shut down. I think that one is BS.

Pandora has money in the bank and Joe Kennedy is a fiscally responsible guy. If he was going to wind down the venture, I suspect he would try to return as much money as possible, and not waste any money on a farewell party. Not to mention that Tim Westergreen is a hell of a fighter. He didn?t keep the company alive on fumes after the last crash just to give up the ghost without seeing if Inslee?s new Radio Equality Act can make it to law.

But if they aren?t shutting down, what are they announcing?

My guess would either be 1) an ancillary business that depends less on streaming music and more on generating page views 2) a cool device partnership or 3) an acquisition. Although I think #1 and/or #2 are the most likely.

So now comes the fun part; completely uninformed speculation. I?m gonna take a wild guess and say that Pandora launches a beefed up social networking service that matches folks based on musical tastes AND a partnership with Xbox that allows Xbox live folks to stream Pandora radio straight to the living room. I say Xbox because Pandora?s Jessica Stoner already negotiated a deal with MSN, and clearly has access to the Microsoft organization. I say social networking, because Pandora has already dipped their toe in the water here, and serving up non music dependant page views could help them subsidize ridiculous radio royalties. For good measure let’s throw in some kind of portable device deal. Let’s call it a Zing powered SanDisk player.

Guess I?ll just have to wait to find out what, if anything, is true.

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Streampad’s new beta and a very cool Hype Machine hack

May 2, 2007 at 7:10 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

I just finished chatting with Dan Kantor over at Streampad about a new version of his desktop software that is a lot easier to set up and gets through firewalls. It’s in a limited beta, but I’ll hook the first 50 people to send me an email (ebauman at gmail dot com) with a link to download the software.

For those of you who don’t remember, Streampad allows you to listen to your local music (and/or music from 5 friends) from any PC.

Aside from this nice new functionality, Dan also told me about a way to play the Hype Machine’s top songs through the embeddable Streampad player. Just go to Streampad, click on “web”, click on “open url”, type in “w2” and hit “submit”. Then you can click on share and embed the top Hype Machine tracks in your blog.

I should mention that this page on the Hype Machine let’s you embed their top 10 songs on your site, but Streampad lets you embed over 50 songs.

Check it out:

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Can you predict a hit song?

April 23, 2007 at 5:42 pm · Filed under Digital Music

If you believe Polyphonic HMI, music producers can use an algorithm to identify if a new song will be a hit. Or put another way, if the song doesn’t have “optimal mathematical patterns” (there phrase, not mine), it just ain’t gonna be a hit.

The implications are pretty dramatic for the majors, as their operational costs make them very dependant on artists who can go platinum again and again.

But before you rush out and license Plyphonic HMI’s technology you might want to read this study recently published in the New York Times Sunday edition. (Actually Paul Lamere informed me that the study has been floating around since last Feb. 2006. Note to self; never try to scoop Lamere. That goes for you too, NYT.)

The study essentially found that social influence plays as large of a role in determining a hit song as the song quality.

Now this doesn’t mean that Polyphonic HMI is wrong, (or right), but it does mean that social networking will be one of the most important promotional channels for music within the next 10 years. Or perhaps sooner when you consider that My Space accounted for 6% of Amazon’s music category traffic last October (according to hitwise data I pulled from 17dots).

It also means that if you’re making a site to promote music, and you aren’t incorporating some easy to understand notion of popularity, then you’re not promoting your artists to the fullest. And if you read the article, you’ll find that which music actually becomes a run away hit is pretty tough to predict.

Quoting from Duncan J. Watts, the professor of sociology at Columbia who ran the study:

In our study…more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.

This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

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What’s disruptive about Songbird?

April 2, 2007 at 12:31 pm · Filed under Digital Music

If you’re like me, you’ve downloaded and installed a bijillion little applications from music web services that look at your listening behaviors and do something cool with it. (There’s the iLike application, the Mog-o-matic, Last.FM’s audioscrobbler, and on and on…)

Songbird may put an end to the days of having all those little applications sitting in your system tray. Since Songbird is built on the Mozilla stack with open API’s, any web service can extend Songbird’s functionality and get information about your media consumption behaviors (if you allow them to).

Why is that cool?

It means ticket sites can show you when artists in your music library are coming to town, your favorite social network can broadcast your top music and videos to your friends, your favorite CD/DVD retailer can offer better recommendations based on your existing collection and play behavior, etc. Not to mention that Songbird can also pass all this information to your portable device of choice, from the Squeezebox sitting in your living room, to your new MP3 player.

It’s kinda embarrassing to think that before I met with Rob Lord and Chris Otto at Songbird, I thought of their downloadable media player as just a cool tool for adding any streaming song or video I found on the web to my music library.

In reality, Songbird is trying to be the Rosetta Stone of the digital music ecosystem.

Of course, I have my concerns with Songbird’s revenue model. Guys like Microsoft, Apple, Real Networks and Yahoo are all giving away free desktop software, which they struggle to monetize. Songbird’s CEO, Rob Lord, has several ideas about how to generate cash. For example, they can make some money from their search box and Google Ad Sense, or from up-selling music subscriptions or other services. Although generating money is not their focus right now.

Rather, Rob & Chris are going to focus on making a great product and then getting developers, web services, and device manufacturers to build cool extensions.

I’d love to see them (or help them) cut deals with distribution power houses like Amazon, My Space or Google/YouTube. It would be a win for Songbird, but also for the consumers at those sites.

There are some UI issues I think they should fix as well, but since this is version 0.25, I’m not gonna harp on those. Instead I just filed some bugs to the Songbird team, who for the record, got back to me in less than 24 hours with explanations and status updates. That was very cool.

Big shout out to Rob Lord & Chris Otto for taking the time to talk last week. These guys are true believers in the digital music revolution, and struck me as wholesome to the bone.

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Want to play the main stage at the Warped Tour?

March 29, 2007 at 7:09 am · Filed under Digital Music

That’s right, you can play the main stage at the Warped Tour if you and your band sign up for the right service.

A number of web sites have tried to improve on Rob Lord and Michael Robertson’s original idea of a consumer facing web site meant to promote independent artists (Remember MP3.com before it was C-Net? How about IUMA?)

But with promotional heavyweights like My Space and Last.Fm, how are the smaller players attracting artists to their sites?

Here’s a quick list of the services an artist gets when they sign up with a consumer facing artist promotion site. Most of these services offer artists the ability to set up a promotional page or two, and in many cases, they allow fans to do so as well to facilitate social networking.

UBL: Ability to have an artist web site and pay for promotion (seems like a 1997 feature set, guys! On the other hand, they’ve been around a while, so maybe it is working).

Garage Band: Get your music recommended to iLike users, ClearChannel exposure, and feedback on your songs from artists/fans.

Music Nation: Post your music video in an American Idol like contest where t