What a social network for music might look like

(Clue - not this)

This wasn't meant to be a post about Ping, Apple's pitiful attempt to launch a social platform around the huge wealth of listening data that iTunes holds on 160m people around the world. The less said about Ping the better really - i'll just point out that of the recommended artists to follow in the screengrab above, I have listened to none of them (ever). And that I last shared music recommendations with other people an hour ago, but Ping can import my social graph from none of the four networks I already use to do that (all of which have open APIs)

No, Apple sort of hijacked something much more important. It was meant to celebrate the fact that I've been using LastFM for a year (i mean using properly, rather than just having an account). And in the last year that really has been something that has meant a lot to me. Not the service itself..... well, actually partly the service itself, because being a massive geek I do get excited about being able to chart lots of different parameters of my music listening. (I swear I've never made a spreadsheet from LastFM data though, honest). No, what is more important is using that data to power the best curation and discovery engine imaginable for 'music i might like' - other people who like the same stuff.

So as it's been a year I did look at an 'end of year chart' type of thing, mainly to find out how many of the albums I'd listened to most I had discovered on LastFM. Of the top 25 albums I've listened to most over the last year, 12 of them were by artists I had never heard until they cropped up in my Neighbourhood or Recommended radio. I think that's pretty awesomeThe one thing you can't use it for is to play all this stuff to other people. I've made a playlist on Spotify with my most played tune off each album, which you can find here if you are interested. If you don't know whether you are interested then just look here to see how similar your musical tastes are to mine

MFlow - incentivised music discovery

Whinging about the music industry..... so I said that I'd stop that and concentrate on the positives. Before I do though the Guardian have gone into a bit more detail on exactly what artists get paid by Spotify, which is important, because Spotify wouldn't be streaming music if the record companies weren't getting paid, so somewhere along the line there's a lot of money not going the way of artists.

anyway, positives....
So MFlow is a social music discovery site. And a social music trading site. But one that the record industry approves of. As you can see from the screengrab it looks a lot like Spotify. Essentially the way it works is that you follow people if you share their taste, and they 'flow' tunes to you to listen to. And you can reflow stuff on to your followers. Or of course create your own flows. This all sounds very Twitterly familiar, but the smart stuff is in the trading bit. MFlow is all built into an interface similar to iTunes that allows one click purchase. 20% of the purchase price is passed on to whoever recommended the tune to you. Likewise you make 20% of the price of anything that your followers buy based on your recommendation. The follower/following dynamic is a little bit hit and miss so far, as you can't import your social graph from anywhere else so you have to do a bit of digging. MFlow is still in private beta though, and Facebook, Twitter and LastFM import functionality are coming soon.

I think this is a very smart system for a few reasons. Firstly rather than penalising fans for being fans, it makes discovery and payment part of one process - sharing music is incentivised. Secondly there is a weird thrill to see your first payment come through - it might only be £0.20 per song, but that is essentially someone handing over hard cash to YOU for YOUR great taste. And thirdly it socialises what what (bizarrely) a very solitary pastime. Music itself (creation of, listening to, talking about, organising life around) is extremely social, but the actual physical act of buying it (or downloading it, or borrowing your mate's hard drive full of it, or whatever) is highly solitary since the demise of the music shop. Services like Spotify (lowering the barriers to access to music) and LastFM (the best social discovery system that has been invented to date) get you only as far as hearing music, not buying it. MFlow makes buying music social.

I'd love to know how the payments are structured on the other side though - are musicians going to see any of the potential revenue? Or is their work only going to be licensed in future keep the unnovation-hungry record companies alive for another year?

I think Mflow launches next week some time, but if you want to try it before give me a shout

Record Companies, Bands and the concept of value

(Image used with thanks)
I've never really believed that telling people not to do things was a good way to stop them doing them. The War On Drugs for example has been pretty comprehensively won. By drugs. We are not a logical economically minded species, so changing how we behave changes how we think, not vice versa. And the simplest and most effective way to change how people behave is to make it worth their while - to give them something of value in return.

The idea of enforced behaviour change is in the news at the moment as the Digital Economy Bill has among its aims the toughening of copyright law online. In fact, this is seen as such a significant issue for the British economy that the government is willing to sacrifice on our behalf such seemingly useful things as Wifi (which will be too great a risk for any business to operate), fast broadband (which ISPs will be disincentivised from investing in as their focus will be on steaming open our digital mail), and internet access as a human right (as anyone who doesn't have a decent understanding of home network security can be disconnected from the internet in punishment for what their children or neighbours do). The opposition agrees that although there are parts of the bill that are even worse, they will let the copyright law stand because of its importance to the UK creative industry.

So let's ignore for a minute the fact that large parts of the UK creative industry, particularly those involved with music, don't agree, and have a look at the value transaction in a music purchase.

Record companies developed their business model through the scarcity of resources required to create and market recorded music: recording studios, musicians, pressing plants, distribution, access to radio stations to promote. These scarcities have changed beyond recognition since 1999. With a few $$s investment in software, any computer made in the last 5 years is a fully equipped recording studio (no extra software needed if it’s a Mac). No music now needs to be recorded onto anything. Myspace and a bit of talent can break a band far better than any radio promotion (not hyperbole – the Arctic Monkeys are the fastest selling week 1 debut in history). The scarcity problems that the record industry fixed no longer exist. Clay Shirky talks about this disappearance of scarcity problems in answer to Murdoch's claim that "Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use" by pointing out that this is only half of the equation:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

In the record industry things are slightly different: most people know how to stop creating in the costly and complex ways of the past, but they still want to charge the same amount of money for the product. Which, like the newpaper industry is freely available elsewhere. But while we are left with a near perfect distribution model, there is still a healthy supply and demand. It's just that the intermediaries, the industrial organisations who previously matched supply with demand, are no longer necessary. Supply and demand in recorded music still have two important discriminators: on the side of the vendor, talent to produce music better than the alternatives, and on the side of the purchaser, convenience to consume that music in the way they want.
(Image by Flickr user Mick Yates - used with thanks)
Talent has always been a scarcity: in fact that is why recorded music was developed - because it was more convenient than using actual musicians. That is a compromise, as having actual musicians play for you is a better experience. But the convenience makes it a worthwhile compromise. However as the creation and distribution of recorded music has become next to frictionless, more people are exposed to more music and demand grows for the scarce experience of live music (witness the growth of festivals - pre-Napster the UK had 2 or 3 major festivals each summer: now we have 2 or 3 major ones each weekend of summer). Now this is crucial in the search for music value, as the musicians who are distributing the most recorded music will be in highest demand for the extremely scarce/valuable live music market. So recorded music is essentially advertising the bit that makes money for performers (with the potential to charge for it if it adds to convenience).

Convenience means portability between devices, and it means always available, and crucially it means participatory and recombinant. Those same computers that record music for free also remix it. So that's another element of value: status ("I created this").
Of course, what that all means is that DRM is the antithesis of value in recorded music. Well let's face it, we knew that anyway, but it is worth bearing in mind as music moves to the cloud (convenient). As Techcrunch pointed out this week, many online music retailers are embedding personal identification in the file so that there is the potential to block cloud uploads of anything that was not purchased online (ripped CDs for instance).

So obviously free music downloads harm record companies, and record companies don't want to be harmed. But no-one cares about the intermediary so much of the BPI PR focuses on the artists themselves. This is all based on the premise that if record labels aren't making as much money then that is bad for the industry. The Guardian have been tracking this closely, and this article lists a range of companies profiting from music even while album sales are falling. While they include Spotify, We7, Nokia, Shazam and Apple, they also miss the more obvious ones: Live Nation, Ticketmaster and O2. What all these have in common is that they are not traditional players in the music market. What they don't all have in common is passing their profits on to musicians. Spotify is useful case study: aside from the slick interface the real stroke of genius that allowed Spotify to scale quickly was to avoid the endless legal wranglings with record labels over payments (at least in Europe - they are still bogged down in the US). This allowed them to quickly access most of the music that you might want to play on the service. And they accomplished this by making sure that those payments went to the record labels rather than the artists, by effectively paying in Spotify stock. This is a cap table for Spotify (from this piece on Techcrunch, which also investigates what price the labels paid for their stock)

Shareholders in Spotify on 10/7 2009
Bolag Andel
Rosello (Lorentzon) 28,6%Instructus (Ek) 23,3%
Northzone Ventures 11,9%
Enzymix Systems (F. Hagnö) 5,8%
Sony BMG 5,8%
Universal Music 4,8%
Warner Music 3,8%
Wellington IV Tech 3,8%
Creandum II LP 3,5%Swiftic (Strigéus) 2,6%
Creandum II KB 2,4%
EMI 1,9%
Merlin 1,0%
SBH Capital (B. Hagnö) 0,8%

Helienne Lindwall in The Guardian suggests that the labels paid roughly 1/1000th of the price that other investors in the service paid. This would certainly have made negotiations on the price per stream simple - they would be kept artificially low to minimise the amount that had to be paid out to artists. Spotify has been removed from the Guardian's Fair Trade Music Business list
So there are grey areas even in the proposed saviours of the traditional music business. And 'value' is very different for fans and artists than it is for the intermediaries. And back to my original point, why won't artificial scarcity (of the kind supported by the Digital Economy Bill) work? Well, apart from it being counter to the way the internet works? The internet (in its earliest guise as ARPANET) was developed as a peer to peer system. One of its early benefits was the potential to maintain government communications in the event of a nuclear attack on the USA. This is because P2P systems route around blockages (an inexact analogy might be to say that they treat blockages as wounds, which they are able to heal). Although consumer access is nowadays based on a server/client relationship mediated by ISPs, the internet remains a global P2P system.

Other than that it won't work because telling people to change their behaviour doesn't work. It's currently not working in France, where total free downloading is up by 3% since the introduction of strict HADOPI laws last year(chart from Arstechnica, stats from M@rsouin, CREM, Universite de Rennes).

and because potential of the internet combined with the creativity of musicians and developers means that there is plenty of value for anyone who has good ideas and talent. So after this little rant I'm going to quit whinging about the record industry, and celebrate great marketing ideas from those creative folks.

Save 6Music. At the expense of what?

If anyone has ever scrolled all the way down the side of this blog to the LastFM widget, they would probably guess that I listen to 6Music as well. It's basically where they let all the most opinionated and passionate music fans on the BBC payroll (Steve Lamacq, Marc Riley, Lauren Laverne, Jarvis Cocker, etc) do what they want, in return for doing what the BBC wants the rest of the time. And as has been widely reported, and widely criticised, the BBC are closing it as part of a radical programme of cuts.

To me this raises are few interesting questions. Firstly, the fact that popular and cross party political opinion leaves the BBC no choice but to make cuts to defend its licence fee. Before the recession an ambitious BBC could defend its increasing commercialisation of brands like Top Gear and CBeebies (which owe their popularity to having initially been licence-fee funded) by having to compete with ad-funded competition. Since ad-funded competition has all but disappeared in a perfect storm of disappearing ad revenues and pension deficit disasters (not to mention a distinct lack of leadership/recruitment crisis at critical moments from the main terrestrial competition), this argument has vanished, and probably won't return.

So the BBC is left with a healthy licence fee income while ITV and C4 slash programming budgets and staff. As the newspaper industry goes to town on stories of rampant expenditure on salaries (management as well as Wossy) and Broadcasting House refurbishment, defending the BBC's sole use of licence fee income becomes impossible without cuts of some kind.

On one hand, 6Music is exactly what the BBC should be producing - things that appeal to niche audiences where there is no commercial alternative. While the remit of a licence fee funded media company has to cover the whole country, there is no excuse in the 21st century for thinking that this has to be in one place. The BBC shouldn't need to care about the ratings of individual programmes, simply about their cumulative reach across the whole country every month. In lots of little, personally relevant chunks.

Looking at it from that perspective, the cost saving opportunities become more obvious. ITV makes better soaps that the BBC (or it makes, Corrie, which is better than Eastenders). It also makes better Saturday night peak - Pop Idol vs Celebrity Come Dancing. So those are my opinions, but they are backed by viewing figures most weeks. Anyway, there are more popular alternatives commercially available. Why not cut the expensive stuff that commercial broadcasters do better, and concentrate on the niches.

On the other hand, it is quite possible that there would be commercial alternatives to the niche personal stuff that the BBC makes, if only they didn't make it. ITV still has a business model when BBC1 exists, as does News Int to compete with bbc.co.uk (although Murdoch doesn't seem to agree). Perhaps the commercially funded 6Music couldn't exist as it could never escape the shadow of Radio 1. All 6Music really is is an aggregation of the music tastes and opinions of some well respected music industry professionals, backed by the marketing support of Radio 1. Intriguingly, the barriers to those individuals continuing to curate their opinions and tastes for an hour a week are pretty small: Ricky Gervais pretty much wrote the manual on this in podcasting terms, but there are all sorts of ways of dicing this up through iTunes, LastFM, and hundreds of other routes. The technology and distribution costs are tiny. The streaming rights are all in place on Spotify. LastFM, We7, etc. So do the people involved in 6Music think it is worth saving?

Personally I'm signing all the petitions to #Save6Music. Not because I like it - I do, but that's irrelevant. We should save it because it represents what the BBC should do far better than Eastenders or anything on Saturday night peak BBC1. But if it isn't saved by the BBC then I hope that the curators who made it what it is can prove that it is commercially viable.

iPhone apps for bands

Yep, it's not just brands that are at it, up and coming bands are doing the app thing as well. Obviously there's established bands already been doing this: Coldplay example here. But all bands have ready made content in tunes and videos (not just music vids - this example showcases a load of stuff from YouTube: onstage views of the audience, random interviews with the band, the sort of thing that any band with a Flip and a bit of personality could come up with). The pics below are from new Kitsune act Chew Lips' app put together by Xenodium. As well as brief biog and long video menu, there are also four tunes (streamed rather than integrated into the app - and from what I can tell optimised for 3G rather than wifi streaming, as there's far less drop-out in the 3G performance),


and live listings with links to Ticketmaster.

Xenodium appear to the be the musician's app provider of choice in the UK, but MobBase in the US not only offer a $50 app build for musicians, but were even marketing it as an Xmas gift for musicians last month.

Love to know how many downloads these are getting, as if the music is worth listening to you'd keep the app on there for long enough to remember the name -

MOG: musical love child of Spotify and Last FM

Or that's what this intro video suggests. According to TechCrunch this launches on the 2nd Dec in the US.


Mog appears to have all the social discovery and customisable radio bits of Last FM but with Spotify style streaming added in. All for $5 per month. I'm currently ok with a mix of iTunes, Spotify and Last FM, each covering the bits of 'listening to music' that they are individually good at. There's no mention of mobile yet, on the MOG site, but I reckon if there was an app for that then I'd pay for one service that can do everything.

(although the price is a clue that I might not be able to: Mog's opportunity is that Spotify STILL isn't live in the US. While this great for Mog, music industry hobbling of any sort of international streaming standards means that we probably won't see this in the UK for ages)

Last.fm - a slight return

I've written a lot about Spotify on here, because it's a great concept that (seems) to have a long term business model. But let's face it, there is a big hole in the model around socialised discovery of new stuff to listen to. While sites like Spotifylists.com make sharing possible, possible is a long way off where a brand like Spotify should be.

(Spotifylists also looks like it has attracted the same spam pollution that seems to mark anything that is becoming genuinely popular - check the 'small claims filing' playlist).

Of course there is a perfectly good way to find find what other people who share your taste in music like, on Last.fm. I deleted my Last.fm account back in 2007 when they were taken over by CBS, as I personally didn't want to give a record label access to my hard drive, and I didn't know just how much access Last.fm's scrobbling function would give them. So two and a half years on there don't seem to have been any prosecutions for whatever it is that constitutes 'things that record labels can prosecute you for' these days, and I'd largely forgotten about Last.fm. I was bemoaning Spotify's lack of sharing features a few weeks ago and someone pointed out that all the things I was after from it were so 2006, and I decided to give Last.fm another go - lets face it, it was a bit ahead of its time.....

Ok, so I was wrong. And my Last.fm profile is a bit lonely. If you're passing that way then look me up, and if you share similar tastes, I'm a little behind the curve on friends over there!

Spotify for iPhone - owning or renting?

Ok here it is: Spotify the iPhone/Android app:Which is in itself a bit of a surprise - Apple not really having a reputation for approving iPhone apps that duplicate the phone's core functionality. And let's face it, regardless of where the music is stored, Spotify wipes the floor with iTunes for user experience. But where the music is stored is the importnant bit. Spotify can cache up to 3,300 tunes in offline mode: ie it stores them on your phone... in much the same way that iTunes does. As long as there is enough memory on your phone, as from my sums 3,300 tunes would take up about 23 Gb. Which even on the biggest iPhone would not leave much space for iTunes!

The obvious flaw in the system for most people is the requirement to pay £9.99 per month to continue to rent your music from Spotify in this way. The beauty of Spotify's streaming music service wasn't just the user experience; it was the freemium mix of ad-supported 95% and subscription-paid 5%. People who have the disposable income to justify £120 per year on music rental, as well as an iPhone in the first place, are also likely to own a lot of music already. Like me, they might also be quite attached to the idea of owning music. To be honest, in the UK this is unlikely to change as Gen Y grows up: we are a nation of wannabe owners, as our housing market will testify. So, while this app is potentially exciting, the potential for most people is more because of what it might mean for future app approvals - the Grooveshark or We7 app for instance. If the pricing can be sorted out (not to mention actually being able to operate in the US at launch), then Spotify Mobile may just have broken down the barriers for someone else to rush through.

Another Orange summer

It's June, festivals are on their way, the Glasto countdown has started, so it must be time to revisit two of the best brand ideas that have been around for a few years. Orange's Spot The Bull broke lots of online/offline boundaries last year, and this year looks like it's after the banner/microsite divide, using 3D (ish) expanding ads to create a very playable version of the game in-banner.
(that's the Flashtalking demo page - I wouldn't normally go to AOL Music, honest)
But some top UX design and Glasto tickets prizes pales compared to Orange's other work this week, which sees the launch of year two of RockCorps. Contagious claim it as a cliche for being too good

"Orange RockCorps represents a tidy fusion of as many new media clichés as you’d care to name. Branded Entertainment? Check. Social networking? Check. Corporate Social responsibility? Check. Essentially a programme encouraging youngsters to put in a couple of hours of community service in exchange for tickets to massive gigs, the real strength of the campaign/platform/whatever is in some phenomenal CRM (check, check, check). Regular yet unobtrusive missives from the RockCorps team promote line-ups and suggest projects with which one might want to get involved....User-generated content as WELL?"

To me though this is more about connecting - how to put a brand in the centre of a network. RockCorps connects people with good causes, it connects music fans with live music, it connects exclusive experiences with charitable donation...it CONNECTS. To quote Henry Jenkins (about the future of marketing generally, rather than specifically about RockCorps)

"it pulls people together and gives them something to do"

And as Contagious mentions, it looks like there is going to be a role for last year's participants to share their experiences to encourage this year's. And given Orange's track record for lighting lots of fires and sticking with the ones that burn, there will probably be more marketing support, more scale, and higher profile bands involved in this one.

We7 - free music streaming and sharing

Free music - Summer Tunes

I have a have a tendency to request Beta invites for anything that looks like it might be interesting, and then often forget to actually do anything with them. I guess that's what happened with We7, a Spotify competitor that has just emailed me an invite code.
The interface web rather than desktop-based, but the selection of music looks at first glance to be a good start (ie lots of artists I like, but not necessarily all of their albums). What is interesting though are the sharing options; playlists can be set up as apps in your social network, although currently that only works as long as your preferred network is Bebo. The playlist appears in your profile page like this:
And can offers embed codes like the one at the top of the page. As it's a sunny day I've grabbed a few tunes that remind me of summer, but with a bit of a range of style and era to show the range of music already available on We7.

I don't think this is anything radically new, but the idea of embed and share app codes for playlists is pretty sleek. While you can do far more on LastFM, you have to start parting with cash to get any of Last's better features. And obviously, I like having all the music there is available on my desktop.

Image of the Day: Copy > Control

Don't think I'm going to be adding much to GeekMedia over the next couple of weeks: there's a strong smell of pitch work looming. So short stuff it is. I've always been better at words than pictures, so thought I'd challenge myself to come up with some images instead. And rather than summarise all the problems the legacy record industry is facing (see yesterday), I thought this covers it.

Betting against the future

I used to work on a financial spread betting client, which involved learning a lot about how that sector worked, how people with different attitudes to risk used the site, what helped someone using the site for the first time start off with realistic expectations, etc. The main thing that every serious spread better is looking for is the 'edge' - the approach or the knowledge that will make them successful. The simplest approach is to watch out for news stories or interviews and be able to react quickest; many spread betters never get beyond trading this way. However, it is time and labour intensive and relies heavily on luck.

So the article in the Times today in which the CEO of EMI explains why his company will be betting against the 21st century and investing heavily in the 20th reminded me of this. The skill in spreadbetting off news stories is getting information about something about to go wrong, and then selling it before the market does. If I had the time or money to still play around with these sites, I would be selling every bit of EMI I could get my hands on. Any sort of long term bet against this company's future looks a pretty safe investment. As The Music Industry Manifesto points out , this is a corporate suicide note. Actually, it's not even that: a suicide note shows intention, whereas this interview just shows lack of understanding at a fatal level (in the same way that intentionally jumping in front of a train would be suicidal, whereas not realising the danger of playing on train tracks is fatal stupidity).

You might expect that Terra Firma, the VC that owns EMI, might be considering backing a more clued up CEO in the near future.
(Hat tip to Jonathon MacDonald for the sources)

Facebook's attitude to data

Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine

Facebook updated their Terms of Service today, with an amendment that has caused a lot of people to question how worthwhile their FB profile really is. Basically what has happened is that Facebook have used one of their rights as set out in the ToS to change any term that they want to, with no warning or right of appeal. That shouldn't cause anyone any problem, as you all knew they had this right from when you read the ToS back when you signed up, right? Oh.

And the term that they have decided to change is this: it used to say

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof

but importantly it also used to add this:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

That bit has been removed and replaced with this:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

So the amendment seems to have changed things from 'we can do what we want with your data until you tell us to stop', to 'we can do what we want with your data forever and you better get used to it'. This is obviously a concern, particularly for for example for musicians who post their tunes and videos on FB - not only is any content posted automatically the property of Facebook, but this amendment removes any way of regaining it by leaving the network.

Personally I think that there is not enough use of Facebook as a creative community that this change has been made to steal and licence content, and it clearly won't be now, as artists and musicians will surely revert to networks offering fair usage terms. It does raise a question about data and the internet though. The C20th record label business has fought for ten years to continue to 'own' data that costs nothing to store or distribute, It also refers regularly to people stealing content by using P2P networks and BitTorrent, and as of today is back in court in Sweden trying to close down PirateBay for breach of copyright on a global scale.

Although on the one hand you have an out-of-date business model trying to stem the inevitable flow of data into the public domain, and on the other a behemoth of the internet age struggling to live up to its venture capital billing, these cases are similar. If data is free and in the public domain, then anyone can use it for whatever reason. If we put a caveat on that such as 'whatever legal reason', then the record companies are in the right, as copyright is part of all [western] legal systems. If we support PirateBay, then the argument follows that Facebook can have all the pretty pictures that we have given them of our own free will and do what they want with them.

And by and large I think I agree with the second part - if we choose to hand over data rights in return for a really really easy way to share it with our friends, then we shouldn't be overconcerned about what Facebook does with it. With the very very important addition that we should also be able to ask for that right back at any point. So up till now Facebook data rights has been a fair trade - I wouldn't upload my own music on there, but I can see the cost/benefit if I did. But now it seems suspicious.

Still not sure about whether it is any worse that what we've done to record companies - however, I also don't care, as they profiteered from me and every other music fan for 50 years (actually only about 25 for me specifically - I'm not THAT old). And that is the other important point, because at the end of the day this isn't something that is going to be ruled on by a judge or a barrister. If Facebook has gone too far here, we will be the judge. We will either use it or not use it - another bit of breaking news today showing how it can be done: the campaign against New Zealand's repressive copyright laws shows both the depth of feeling and the impact of having @stephenfry get behind your campaign. And I think that that is the difference - no-one will line up to save the record business because no-one cares. They were just a middleman. The difference is not one between data being free or owned, it is between people caring and not caring. If we care about data privacy, we will use the network that Facebook has created to make a change (as seen in Beacon), in the same way that data has fought to be free of the clutches of the record industry. If not, then it probably wasn't that important.
(Hat tips to Mashable and Stephen Fry for sources)

Spotify: Not losing a battle but winning the war

For all the love that Spotify has had from the tech and music community in its 4 months of beta, this has seemed a pretty tricky week. Basically some bands have been pulled from the service, mainly due to geographic issues with rights in different countries. From what I can see there isn't one particular label that has thrown toys out of the pram: user comments from the Spotify blog suggest that this mainly at individual bands' requests (in the same way that bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones are particularly anti C21st music distribution) - Led Zeppelin are one of the quoted parts of the archive that has been removed. However most of the unsupportive comments appear to be from fans of niche genres - Spotify is a Swedish company, and there are a number of references to Scandinavian synth music and metal being removed. As no-one could have predicted the rate at which Spotify has grown in the UK (200k subscribers) since December, you can understand that international rights will have become an issue that bands may not have considered. If these bands find that after consideration that they would prefer not to reach an audience growing at quarter of a million music lovers a month, then that's fair enough. It's clear from the blog comments that people will go back to Piratebay rather than Amazon if Spotify is taken away from them though.

None of this should detract from the fact that this application is adding tunes at a rate of 10,000 per day, and is on the verge of mass appeal in the UK with hugely positive Guardian and NME features this week. The most important news for Spotify is not in its content though - it is a distribution platform, and has taken a huge step this week in becoming a viable competitor to iTunes by employing a Head of Mobile, Gustav Soderstrom from Yahoo. Mobile is the ultimate destination for music content, and the speed that which the application spreading makes an ad-funded business model viable. Could a tech startup really save both the music and the mobile industry from Apple?
(thanks to Zia George at Spotify for audience data)

Written whilst listening to Airborne Toxic Event, MGMT, Killers and Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, who are all still available on Spotify)

Cadburys' Difficult Second Album

I've never really thought that you could properly be a fan of a band that had only released one album. The more you like the first one, the greater the potential let-down if everything goes down hill from there. I think it's technically know as Stone Roses syndrome. So I've always reserved judgement, and most of the bands I have loved are ones who have really delivered second time round - stuff like Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, Arcade Fire (NB. I'm not linking to anything here. The point isn't really about my personal music taste).

So for all the well deserved praise for Fallon's Gorilla work for Cadburys, the Glass & a Half Productions idea has seemed a little tarnished for me by the pointless truckracing follow-up (an ad that would have made more sense had it been audio only, as Don't Stop Me Now is the only joyful thing in it).

But there has also been a part of me that will reserve judgment on a band that suffers from difficult second album syndrome. You can always turn it round with the third, as The Killers have recently proved and hopefully Kasabian and Franz Ferdinand will soon. So it made me very happy to see the new Eyebrows work that breaks tonight. Just as warm, arresting and generally daft as the Gorilla, and with much better music (Don't Stop the Rock by Freestyle, since we're talking about tunes).

And apart from being witty and likeable, there's a couple of other things that stand out in this spot. First one is pretty obvious - Gorilla was copied, mimicked, mashed up and responded to, and that took a bit of work - hiring Gorilla suits and drumkits were pretty much a prerequisite for any sort of YouTube homage. This one is clearly designed to be mimicked in offices and playgrounds across the land with a minimum of effort. A sort of visual 'Wassup!'. Second thing is that this is a 60" ad that will get funnier the faster you view it - ie it is virtually DVR-proof. Having only seen the clip posted here I am guessing, but I'm setting the Sky+ for it this evening to see whether it is best at 1x, 6x or 30x normal speed. And as anyone who follows my TV writing will know, that makes me think it is very special indeed.

2009 - the year of Spotify

Not sure if I missed some hype about Spotify in 2008, but one of the benefits of having 2 weeks off doing anything is the chance to catch up. What I really wanted to do was catch up on lots of music I'd not got round to downloading over the year, but what I found was basically all the music you could want (well, nearly) completely free. I'd intended to check out loads of bands I'd only heard on the radio to see if there was more to them than singles (and whatever the iTunes lovers say, a quick blast isn't enough). Turns out I just need to log in to Spotify and put a playlist together.

Looks like this is ad-funded (although there are hardly any ads currently - I've heard two in two weeks - expect that it would need more ad inventory once it moves public to avoid a purely subscription model), and currently in private beta (only took me a few days to get an invite though - I've got a few more, so email/DM me if you want a go). There are subscriptions available, but I'd need a lot more annoying advertising to make me think about paying. Buffering is quick and smooth, and the app is very low impact, even on my most underpowered netbook. This suggests that it will be easy to port to mobile: should see an iPhone version imminently. The software itself has an iTunes feel to it, only without the clunkiness and latency that you get running iTunes on a Windows machine.

The real beauty of this system is that the major labels are already signed up - EMI, Warners, SonyBMG & Universal already buy into the business model. I reckon the mobile version could be this year's killer app - question is whether it will be a partnership with a mobile brand or network (in a ComesWithMusic sort of way), or whether they will release applications for the huge range of devices that are going to be open to 3rd party software this year. The quick win (if ad-funding starts to fail) would be the first option. The killer app would be the second.

Fan post....Airborne Toxic Event

Ok, this isn't what i write about, but i'm claiming it as I keep getting drawn into writing about music as it is so important to brands, especially the mobile brands who tend towards interesting marketing
Anyway, if you like Arcade Fire as much as I do, these guys rock!

Are brands the new record labels?

There's a few things I've seen this week that reminded me of this Media Week article from a couple of months back. Firstly the Nokia Comes With Music campaign launching (actually there's a Comes With Music blog that looks like it is Nokia's work as well - including a Blogger video widget that should play the TV ad, but doesn't work. I would play it here, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to embed it. To be honest, it isn't good enough to bother actually spending time adding, so I guess it is an example of why all content that a brand creates should be easily shareable). Now there's no surprise that mobile brands are positioning themselves as music curators with ever increasing desperation... after all, if your marketing is so far removed from your R&D that you have to rely on it to create artificial product differentiation, you are in a pretty bad place as a brand. If you are in that position (which I'd suggest that Nokia are) and your main competitor is Apple, who wrote the book on designing products that market themselves, then you really are in trouble. Anyway, it is another step in the erosion of value in music content.

02 are also raising the stakes in the battle for control of the live music scene, announcing their sponsorship of the Academy venues across the country, giving O2 customers priority ticketing and content access to the main mid size gig venues in London, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle, Oxford, Sheffield & Leeds, to add to the existing O2 Arena and Wireless Festival. This one makes sense to me, as it is more about the brand facilitating experiences (gigs) that are hard to access (as Academy size gigs sell out in hours. Well, Brixton certainly does) than abount positioning O2 as an aggregator of musical content.

That isn't too say that branded content is a bad thing in music, rather that Nokia's approach seems a bit desperate! What really interests me is the work that Intel are doing at the moment.

All of the bands mentioned in the Media Week article were established artists who wanted more freedom than they could expect from the major labels who had built their careers. Neither Groove Armada/Bacardi or McFly/McDonalds is a particularly cutting edge choice of partner for either party. Likewise neither Paul McCartney nor Starbucks had very much to lose when cosying up for an instore release. What Intel are doing is interesting because it focuses on the unsigned acts, where there is a much bigger potential payback for the brand investing. Bedroom bands are of course the natural territory for Intel, whose processors power demo recording across the world, but unsigned bands don't cost much compared to Paul McCartney or Groove Armada and there is far more kudos to being seen to support one.

Of course, this is not really any more radical an idea than a battle of the bands for the X-Factor era, with added advertising support from Intel's deep pockets. However, it raises the interesting question of what Intel will do with the winning band. If this develops into a crowdsourced talent scouting operation for the first signing to their label, then we could be seeing the first move towards brands as record labels in the traditional sense - ie. not just marketing music, but supporting the artists that shape popular culture.

There are still plenty of rumours that Red Bull are going to do this properly (still surprises me that they haven't, after having run the Red Bull Academy for 10 years now). However, it is the agency holding companies that really seem to be slow off the mark. Global agencies, whether creative or media, still seem to think in terms of audio-visual. Fair enough, that is what made their fortunes, but surely branded content divisions should be employing the A&R people who get pushed out as the economic crisis starts to hit the already contracting major label market. Agencies have always had the power to make artists' careers (hello Moby, Dandy Warhols, etc), but the real potential for client brands lies in discovering acts at times in their careers when they most need to trade.