This site is a blog for musicians and music industry people. It is a free educational resource and it is also the way I advertise my music consulting services. I am an entertainment professional with deep roots in the music industry. Throughout my music career I have been a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a reality show producer, a bass player and the head of a digital record label.
Kristin Bredimus is Vice President of Community & Artist Relations at OurStage, a music-centric social media platform that provides undiscovered artists with unique opportunities to share their music to fans and industry people. With over a decade of experience in music business, Kristin got her start photographing local bands while attending art school in Boston, which eventually led her to a career as an artist manager helping musicians through the process of recording, music releases, touring, negotiating record and licensing deals and promotion. She went on to become the Director of the NEMO Music Festival – where she managed over 400 artists on 30 stages across three days – and the Boston Music Awards. She started working with OurStage in 2007 as a consultant, working her way up to her current role as an advocate and advisor to the more than 225,000 artists and 4.5 million fans that use the platform.
Kristin recently talked to me about how her passion for working with emerging and independent artists began and how the OurStage platform can help musicians find opportunities to grow their careers. She also provided some advice to bands that want to get their music heard and build a loyal fan base.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me, Kristin. How did you get into the music business?
KB:
I actually got into the music industry through photography. I was a photography major at the Massachusetts College of Art, and I started to take band photos for people I knew in bands to help get their promo shots together. In doing this, I inevitably became friends with some of the bands. And being a Bostonian, we have a really large, eclectic music scene. So, I had a bunch of friends who were either musicians or artist managers. Initially I was trying to connect the bands that I had photographed with different managers I was friends with. The bands were all baby bands, so my friends that were artist managers said, “Until we can start making money from a band, it’s really premature for them to start working with people of our caliber.” But one of them said, “If you’re interested in working for this one particular band, I’d be happy to coach you on what you need to do to be an artist manager.”
That’s essentially how it started. I went from photographing a band, to managing a band called Hero Pattern that was based in New Jersey. My friend Ami Bennitt, who was the manager of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, gave me tips on what to do. Then, I started networking. I took an approach where I sat down with every member of the band and had them give me a list of every band and every industry contact that they had. Then I started trying to figure out how I could get in front of people who could positively influence their career. At the same time, in my own community in Boston, a friend of mine was taking over the NEMO Music Festival and the Boston Music Awards, so he asked if I would help out with that. Then I eventually became the Director of that music festival and of the Boston Music Awards.
Initially, I was trying to just make as many inroads in the music industry as possible. And having worked in art – and I’d also worked in film for a while – I was really surprised by how effortlessly I could start to network. It seemed like the music industry – even more than the film and art industries – was really propelled by personal relationships. People at all different levels in the ecosystem were really willing to talk and be helpful as long as I respected their time, presented myself and my clients in a professional manner and there was genuine talent and drive behind any artist I tried to position.
From there, my personal career evolved. I stopped managing bands. And I sought out different jobs opportunities that allowed me to work with many more independent artists, because I’m interested in working with artists as they’re making their way out in their careers. I enjoy working with people that are hungry, passionate and creative. And I think as an artist gets more and more successful in their career, particularly in the traditional model of the music industry, a lot of times there is a lot of other people that are kind of informing their image and their music. And it becomes less and less about what the artist wants. So, I’ve always really enjoyed working with an artist in the beginning and helping them make some decisions, but also trying to find that balance between being a smart business person and still being an artist.
I’ve worked with a handful of people at labels throughout the years. And they had worked with many multi-platinum artists. A few of them in particular would only hang up the Gold record for each artist, and I would ask them why. They would say, “That was the most meaningful one – that first stretch to Gold.”
KB:
Yes. It’s funny, because I think a lot of people working in the industry all have different motivations. I think because I was a visual artist, I’ve always really enjoyed working with artists as they are emerging.
That’s why the NEMO Music Festival and the Boston Music Awards were great for me to be a part of, because they were really helping to illuminate the emerging artist. Those two events were part of a company called TRP Sports and Entertainment. So, I essentially ran their music division. And we would do a lot of other music-centric promotion with brands. In doing this, I was introduced to OurStage because another friend in the music industry was hired to work for the company and basically help make introductions to people and companies within the music industry that had access to a talent pool of emerging artists. At launch, OurStage needed to help seed the site with emerging talent. So, I went to my database of a few thousand artists and told them about it.
I eventually became an official consultant for OurStage. I’ve been working with the company in some capacity since they launched in 2007. In 2011, I was promoted to Vice President of Community & Artist Relations. It’s nice to be still working within the music industry, still working with independent artists and to have a job and a career that continues to grow. I know it’s been really hard for a lot of my peers over the last few years as the industry has changed. I’m very appreciative of my job.
I think if you work in the music industry, you have to be very flexible and get creative. So, finding an angle that’s technology based is a good example of that flexibility and creativity. We actually work with a lot of music industry majors at Northeastern. When I’m interviewing the next round of prospective co-ops, I always tell them that working for a company like OurStage will actually give them an advantage, because they will need to learn a lot about technology and social media. And a lot of different elements of the music industry will be touched upon, because within OurStage, we do music licensing, produce large events to give artists opportunities, etc.
I was at OurStage kind of early on and was actually in conversations with someone about Musak. I remembered going to the site and thinking, “Is this a battle of the bands? Is this a community? Is this social media?” I remember feeling very overwhelmed by it. I have clients that use it, but I haven’t been back in a while. Clearly, you have a lot of traffic and a lot of registered participants. Tell me a little bit about the direction and the benefit this site provides to artists.
KB:
Everything that you said is totally valid. Because the company is very much a startup, part of what we struggled to do is provide a lot of different value for a lot of different silos within the industry. And sometimes we do that with grace, and sometimes we are aware that our offering needs to be advanced. Part of what we’re doing for 2012 is to really make all our offerings very clear to all the different types of users that come to the site, whether they are music lovers, music industry people or independent artists.
What OurStage is best known for is being a competition platform. Every single month we offer unique opportunities to emerging artists. The intention is to create opportunities that can really be a catalyst in an artist’s career – something to get them on the radar of a larger pool of people in the industry that can influence their career and a larger audience of fans. We do things like run “opening act” competition for artists giving them the opportunity to open for people like Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Kid Rock and other artists. We’ll also do collaborations where an artist will be asked to collaborate with some sample tracks from artists like T-Pain or John Legend. We’ve also done competitions that award the artist recording and studio time with influential producers like Mike Flynn, who does A&R at EPIC and is a producer who has worked with The Fray and Sara Bareilles.
It’s basically about creating unique opportunities that bands can’t get elsewhere. We don’t charge any money to artists that are awarded these opportunities. Essentially, artists are asked to create a profile on the site. And we encourage them to really fill out their profiles and their EPKs, then enter their best original songs into our monthly music competition.
The types of industry-related opportunities we offer vary every month. And it’s not available for all genres of music. Generally speaking, they’re divided up between pop, rock, country and urban opportunities. Even if we don’t have an industry-centric opportunity, we give away $5,000 each month to an emerging artist. It’s really intended to give them an amount of money that can fund recording, a tour, a van or will provide the artist with whatever it is they need.
The paranoid artist within me – because that’s how I got into this business – would say, “That’s great that you don’t charge, but how does OurStage make money?”
KB:
We make money a few different ways. We make money through ad sales. We also make money through our sponsored competitions, because it’s really an interactive branding play for some of these artists and companies.
Well, and I would imagine if, for example, you’re giving away Shure microphones, that would be great PR for them.
KB:
Exactly. We also have a couple partners who have invested in the company, one of which is MTV Networks.
We are also looking to build out a suite of tools that will be something we would charge artists and industry people for. But of course, there would be a value to utilizing those tools. That’s something that we’re working on in 2012. When we get to the point where there is some kind of subscription service, we will of course keep in mind that there has to be real value to the artist, and that our price point needs to be reasonable.
Having managed bands, I am always very skeptical of any type of business that wants money from an artist. I’m also sensitive to the fact that a lot of artists are working crappy day jobs so they are available to go on tour and record. As a result, they don’t have an endless supply of funds. So, if they are going to spend any money, they need to spend it very wisely. We also have to understand what their individual economics are, because they have to take care of their recording costs, merchandise, gas for touring, etc.
That’s part of what my role is within the company. I act as the artist advocate. OurStage wants to be artist friendly. Whenever we make any decision, the artist is paramount to any choices that we make.
Other than the contest platform, you mentioned licensing and some other parts of the company. What are some of OurStage’s other elements?
KB:
It all ties into the competition. Essentially, when an artist enters a competition, what ends up happening is that a community of music lovers starts to sort all the songs that are competing in what we call a “channel.” At the end of it, an artist can win a prize, whether it’s cash or an opportunity.
What then happens, which a lot of artists aren’t aware of, is that we then generate a music chart. We display the top 100 artists that are ranked within every music channel. And that top 100 artists list then becomes a way for my team to start sorting the gems. We might identify an artist we want to feature in our online magazine. We often do features on our emerging artists, because want to be one of the first voices writing about them. We know that a lot of times our artists are just getting out there, so it’s very important for them to have a well-written, concise bit of press they can add to their EPK and press clippings.
Another thing we do is source music for music licensing opportunities. And that’s one of the reasons Dave Bason at the MGMT Company is working with OurStage. He and a small team of people that we’re building right now are setting up a licensing division. And OurStage is editorially vetting artists from these top 100 charts that a larger community of fans have vetted. Then, we’re approaching select artists and seeing if we can represent their catalog and position licensing opportunities for them. The idea is that OurStage would act as their publishing administrator. Dave and his team would position the song. If licenses are secured, then OurStage would get a percentage off the top of the master and sync fee licenses, although our percentages are largely below the industry standard. Because, again, we want to always be perceived as being artist friendly first and foremost. That division is just getting underway right now. And we have an entertainment lawyer who is working within that division as well.
Another thing I’m doing right now is that some of the program directors over at the X Games are looking for opening acts to perform for their headline acts, who are performing at Belly Up as part of the X Game week of events. Because of the collective relationships that people at OurStage have, people will come to us and say, “I need an artist for this opportunity.” If we have enough lead time, we’ll run a promotion around it. If we don’t we’re still going to present the opportunity to our artists.
With X Games, everything is very time sensitive, so I’ve gone through and made recommendations to the people that are programming the music, suggesting openers for several of their nights. And that happens a lot. And promoting some of these opportunities for artists is something OurStage isn’t necessarily as strong at doing. And this is because we’ve been operating without a marketing director for a while. Again, this is another thing we’re changing in 2012. (Editor’s Note: The X Games/OurStage event did not end up coming to fruition this year.)
All these things that happen behind the scenes will start to bubble up, so artists better understand what the company can offer them. And the hope is that the industry and fans will better understand the role we hope to play in emerging music.
While I realize success has a thousand fathers, is there a success story you can point to where OurStage made a huge difference in a particular artist’s or band’s career?
KB:
That’s a question we get asked a lot. The reality is, when we work with artists, it’s in the very early days of them having a career. Having been an artist, I’m sure you know that any type of success doesn’t happen overnight. The way I like to look at how we positively impact careers is in terms of getting an artist to the next step.
Which artists have had their careers impacted because they were associated with OurStage? Our biggest success story is an electronica act called Plushgun. Plushgun was discovered on our site and signed by Tommy Silverman. So, that’s an example of a band that got a record contract.
But the things we do in general are small steps that get an artist closer to whatever their overall goal is.
You guys have clearly positively impacted dozens, if not hundreds of careers. Unfortunately, people usually ask people whether or not you were responsible for “making” a famous band.
KB:
I personally feel like the future of the music industry is the evolution of a very robust middle class. And it’s a middle class of artists whose career and success is defined by being able to quit their day jobs. So, they’re able to support themselves by virtue of their music, whether they do that through sales, touring or music licensing opportunities; they are artists who are able to make money off their music. Those are the types of artists we help bring to success and get closer to their goals every single day.
There’s an artist who in 2011 had a lot of success as a result of OurStage. His name is Austin Renfroe, and he’s based in Nashville. He has an indie pop sound, and he’s been a big hit in the college/NACA market. I spoke to him actually when he was showcasing at NACA, and he had already booked over 60 dates. He tours about 250 dates per year. In 2011, he was featured in The OurStage Panel, a web series we’ve created. The basic concept is, 16 artists from OurStage get their music positioned in front of 4-5 panelists who are heavy hitters in the music industry. The panel discusses each single and gives some career advice. Then, the artists advance to another round, and there’s a live showcase. One artist won a series of mentoring opportunities and a video EPK to be produced by Mitchell Stuart. Austin was one of the finalists. He got some attention based on this web series. He also won a competition we did with Intel. And he’s actually at NAMM right now with Intel doing some acoustic showcases. And he won $10,000 in cash and a whole suite of tools and gear from Intel, Cakewalk and Gibson.
That’s definitely a success story. Contributing to artists making a living is really important.
You have a pretty unique viewpoint given your particular music industry background and career trajectory. Do you have any parting words of advice for artists trying to make it in the current climate?
KB:
I understand that a lot of artists start to fatigue when it comes to the internet and all the different social media platforms or any web-based platforms or communities. My advice to them is to really understand that you have no control over how or where somebody discovers music. So, if you have the energy, I absolutely recommend having a presence across as many different platforms and within as many different communities as you can. I understand it takes a lot of work. But you just never know who the people are who are loyal to a particular community. And you don’t want to be eliminated from another community.
One example I often see is, a band will have their free social media home and will spend most of their time there. It will have all their updates, their calendar and their music. But a lot of times, when I’m looking for music myself, I might not first go to the website they consider their home. So, then I have to do this scavenger hunt across the internet to try to learn more about the artist. A lot of people don’t have the time or inclination to really search, especially when it comes to new music and new artists. I recommend that wherever you have an online presence, always keep it updated, and include as much information as possible. You should have a concise, well-written bio. And you should have any industry achievements – because that’s always a great way for someone like myself to start to filter out a band or get a sense of how professional they are.
I also recommend having some type of live performance footage, because a lot of times people are starting to vet artists from what they see on the web. Then, make sure that your calendars are always updated. Musicians might not have the funds and the opportunity to be recording music on a yearly basis. But it’s really important to those that will be invested in a new artist’s career to see that the artist is active. The way the average person makes an assessment on how active the artist is, is through their releases or the amount of shows that are in their calendar. If you haven’t released anything for three years and you don’t have any gigs listed in your calendar, that tells me maybe you’re not really serious, your band is inactive, or you broke up. And I’ll just move on to the next artist.
To learn more about Kristin Bredimus and the work she does, visit the official OurStage website. You can also check out the company on Twitter and Facebook.
Todd Tate is a consultant who manages web and social media strategy for musicians ranging from emerging artists to Grammy®-award winners. He is also a musician himself. Todd got his start in the music playing in garage bands as a teenager and went on to study jazz composition, performance and audio production at San Jose State University. After college, he went onto open San Francisco’s Blue Room Studios, where he was an audio engineer for countless CDs, including the 1997 Grammy®-nominated jazz release by Carlos “Patato” Valdez. Todd also served as co-founder and CEO for AngryCoffee.com, a company that launched the first publicly-available web-based interface to Napster and Napster-like networks at the dawn of digital music. He is also the Community Architect for the SF MusicTech Summit, a conference that brings together visionaries in the music/technology space, along with the best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce.
Todd recently talked to me about how he got involved in music and technology and shared some advice for artists who want to gain more visibility online, grow their fan bases and establish solid careers as professional musicians.
How did you first get involved in the music industry, and what brought you to where you are today?
TT:
First and foremost, I’m a long-time musician. I started playing guitar when I was 13 in heavy metal garage bands. And I quickly realized I wanted to go to college and major in music. So, I went to San Jose State University fresh out of high school at 19-years old and majored in jazz performance. I quickly changed that concentration to jazz composition and arranging with a minor in audio production. I got the keys to the recording studio and was the studio manager for a couple years.
I worked my way through college recording heavy metal bands in the recording studio there. I was also the supervisor for the student union’s Community sound system, which was a really professional set up. I learned to work that pretty quickly and would mix bands that came through touring at San Jose State. I supervised and trained other students also. I worked with Firehose and some other really well-known acts during the ‘80s at the amphitheater there.
I actually mixed a popular funk rock band that came through the San Jose State studio called Colorwild, and they encouraged me to join their band. So, I started commuting to Santa Cruz a few times a week and rehearsing. We got really serious as we watched some of our friends get record deals. We packed up our bags and all moved to the same apartment building in San Francisco. That band included Randy Emata – who is now a popular L.A. producer – on keyboards. We played the local club circuit around here in San Francisco.
I also started a production studio here in San Francisco that operated in the Mission District from ’94-‘97 called the Blue Room Studios, named because the recording room was blue. We did a little research as to what would be the most mellow or inspiring color to paint a studio, and it was a light baby blue. I had a lot of experience with Latin jazz in college, and a local producer really liked the Room and really liked my experience with Latin music, so he brought a lot of his business over to the Room and threw me a lot of business that couldn’t afford him at the time. I ended up working on Carlos “Patato” Valdez’s 1997 Grammy®-nominated release, which was a really big honor for me. Tito Puente ended up beating us out.
We had some other luminaries come through the Room. We did all the tracks for Train’s first record. I was the guy who attracted the band into the room and was responsible for sales, marketing and I also participated in a lot of hands-on audio engineering.
During that time, I continued to play in bands. And I ended up playing in a band with the guys who were working at Webmonkey at the time, which was the subsidiary of Wired magazine. Webmonkey was an internet tutorial site. So, they’d have tutorials on how to write HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. I said to my friends, “Wow! This internet thing is getting pretty big.” And a buddy of mine was working for WebMD making really good money writing code. So, they thought since I was an audio engineer and a musician, I should learn HTML and write free tutorials on how to manipulate Internet audio. So, I locked myself in my apartment for thirty days, learned HTML and wrote four tutorials, which included step-by-step instructions, plus screen shots. And the tutorials I made were “How to Make an MP3,” “How to Get Audio into a Flash Movie,” “How to Get Audio into a QuickTime movie” and demo’ed all those things. Then I also did a demo on “How to Manipulate Beatnik Internet Audio,” which was Thomas Dolby’s Web 1.0 play. It was how to sonify the Web so you could scroll over a menu bar and program it to play different scales with a variety of sounds. So, it had a better sound and audio engine than the standard MIDI stuff that first came out on the Web when it first emerged.
I showed the demos to my friend after I finished them, and he thought that the Website should be a company instead of my resume. So, AngryCoffee was born. We found an angel investor that gave us some money and an office South of Market with some desks. We had three full-time people and an extended team of 13. We started offering Web tutorial content to syndicate to e-Learning companies.
Before we knew it, it was May or June of 2000, and everything was crashing down and the whole bubble was exploding. We knew we had to do something spectacular. So, we decided to pull a publicity stunt – hack into Napster. We launched the first publicly-available, Web-based interface to Napster and called it “Percolator”, and the tagline was “Percolating Independent Artists to the Top.” It was just a simple search box on the front door of our website. I know this will sound ridiculous now, but at the time we were trying to get bands to pay us $10 to have their own page on our site. It would include a photo, two legal MP3s, a short bio and a link to their website. What we were doing was taking the Napster search returns and pointing people to our independent artists.
That’s pretty impressive.
TT:
It really took off. We had over 80 major media mentions over three months. I was a panelist on Gavin 2000. Gavin was a radio reporting agency that no longer exists now. I was introduced to the panel by Ted Cohen as “the panel’s pirate” at the time. He had just passed up the gig for CEO of Napster and became the VP of New Media for EMI. And he said to me, “What you are doing is really cool. It would be a real bummer to see you guys go.” So, I told him we’d like to experiment with this thing. But of course, we didn’t want to get sued, and we wanted to do the right thing, because we were all musicians ourselves.
Ted set us up with some interesting meetings and experiments. We got to help promote Radiohead’s Kid A, so at one point we were streaming the entire Kid A record from our website a month before it was released. After it appeared #1 on Billboard, we took the search engine down. Time moved on, and we had some meetings with some people very interested in acquiring the company.. By the end of 2000, we received a $20 million letter of intent from an Italian publicly-traded company. They really liked the brand and the team. It all resulted in a $5 million due diligence process the following April and the result was a pretty good term sheet on moving forward. They went back to Italy and simply couldn’t secure the licensing to make the product legal. So, the acquisition didn’t go through. And shortly thereafter, the Italian stock market crashed.
But I’ve always played music and have kept my eye on technology. Over the years, any time I’ve been in a band, I’ve used technology to share my music online and have helped my friends use technology to share their music online.
And your current gig is focused on digital marketing and consulting. And you also do work with the SF MusicTech Summit as well.
TT:
I’m the Community Architect for the SF MusicTech Summit. Since the inaugural event in 2008, I’ve helped cultivate sponsors, attendees and panelists. I’m retained a couple months before every event, and I reach out to the entire ecosystem of Web music technology, whatever that may be. I vet dozens of companies around every event and then throw them to the executive producer, and he takes it from there and arranges all the panels and closes the sponsorship deals. And then I act as a co-host the day of the event and handle special projects and some of the more popular panelists. As an example, a year ago, I spent half the day handling Ben Folds.
So, tell me a little bit about your consulting business.
TT:
At the core, I’m a musician and a technologist. I’m a web and social media strategy consultant that specializes in production. I’m not one of those guys that just tells people what they should do. I actually build things online for the artist and then try to empower them to operate the entire system by themselves. I’ll build them a website. I usually use some integration of WordPress and will take a really nice paid-for theme and will hack it up so it becomes different from what it was originally. Then, I’ll teach the artist how to log in, blog, change things. Then I use the available social media music tools to integrate with their website and Facebook page, whether that be from RootMusic, SoundCloud, Official.fm, etc. I try to use the tools that are free, because most musicians only have so much money to deal with everything.
And there are a million people with their hands out now.
TT:
Yeah. Lately I’ve been picking up some clients that have a bit of a budget, so I’ve been diving into Topspin a little more, which is great. I’m looking forward to working with that platform a little bit more. Another is Cash Music.
As a guy who is the community architect for the MusicTech Summit, a guy who is a performing musician and a guy who has been Web savvy for this long and has been helping people to make sure their digital strategies are intact, can you give me a list of some of the most common things you see artists doing wrong when they come to you for help?
TT:
If you’re an artist, there’s so much noise out there and so many bands that I believe very strongly you really have to be performing live to get things rolling. You have to start with a locality. A lot of people say that the Internet has leveled out the playing field. But it’s actually made the noise level come up. So, as a band, you can’t just put up a website, give away free music and expect for it to go ballistic. It happens sometimes. But you really have to base things around at least a few short stints of shows. You need the live shows to collect email addresses and get an email list going and get Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc.
One thing I’ve been amazed by in the past is that people don’t know how affordable running Facebook ads can be, especially within just your own locality. That’s definitely one thing I would start with.
As far as concepts for bands go with an online strategy, I’ve got a short mantra or motto: *Find*Listen*Share*Buy*Fan*Go* I describe it in a blog post I wrote for my own site last year. But for bands, I really suggest putting together a good-looking website. I personally have been encouraging websites that don’t have too much going on. If you are currently performing live and you have a video and music, having a front page that just has a couple calls to action that make users do something is great. You should have a front door with a really large, great-looking, high-resolution photo on it. And if you have a video, embed it on the front too. Then, have some sort of a free giveaway in exchange for an email address. From what I’ve seen lately, this is very successful.
And it’s great to have all these social media channels, but it’s also good for the band to operate the social media channels themselves. So, I would narrow that part down to what’s really hot today, which is Twitter and Facebook. Try to build the followers there and engage with those people every day.
You mentioned calls to action. A really good statistic came up not too long ago that you’re twice as likely to get a click-through to follow if you have the simple word “Follow” in front of your Twitter badge instead of just the Twitter badge itself. It’s amazing how gullible we all are as Web travelers that a simple “do this” makes us respond.
TT:
The blog post I wrote that I referred to earlier is really relevant to what we’re talking about and really valuable to bands. It’s basically “search engine optimization” and what I call “social media optimization.” There are so many free services – new or already existing Web music technology companies that are building tools for musicians. They make them free because they want to aggregate all this content. One of the best things to do is sign up for more than a few of these services – especially because they’re free, and most musicians don’t have much of a budget – and try to claim a username. That goes back to having a band name that is actually searchable.
Here’s a great example: I’m doing some work for Gift of Gab right now, who is the non-self-titled world’s greatest freestyle rapper. He’s the rapper for Blackalicious, the classic positive hip hop group. His name is also a saying, so for search engine optimization, it’s a little difficult. If you just search “Gift of Gab” … you’ll get Wikipedia articles, the reference from literature, etc. And then when you use analytic tools to measure sentiment online about his brand, it’s quite polluted with people saying things like, “I’ve got the gift of gab, don’t you wish you had it?” on Twitter, etc.
So, continuing on this subject, I’m working with my own band that’s not performing right now and it’s called “Life Love Misery.” It’s kind of a unique keyword string for a band name. It presents its own search term challenges. Whenever I see a new service, I claim that username immediately. So, I’ve got SoundCloud.com/lifelovemisery, Facebook.com/lifelovemisery, Official.fm/lifelovemisery, etc. I’ve claimed that on every service imaginable. I’ve got another act in which I play the dobro called Sayla Dobro. So, every new startup that comes along, I claim that username. If you search for those names, I have basically flooded the Web with places to find those two acts: Life Love Misery and Sayla Dobro.
The vanity URL is very valuable. It’s a huge bummer when I start working with the band, and either they’ve picked the band name and have already signed up for a bunch of social media sites/Web music tech tool sites, and they’ve chosen their band’s name with “music” at the end. It just doesn’t look as slick.
That’s my take on search engine optimization or social media optimization. Doing this, you can flood the first page of search returns with your brand or band name. It’s pretty rare that someone will search for your music and then go three-pages deep on Google.
Actually, according to statistics, 90% of people never leave the top 3 of the first page.
TT:
There you go. If you look at your search returns as an artist, you really want your website to be the first return at the very top. If you find that’s not working, the thing to do is to start corralling your fans through your social media channels to your website as opposed to always saying, “Find us on Facebook” or “Find us on Twitter.” For me, my new Google+ page comes out on top, then some images come out second, then my website’s coming out as a third return. Then iTunes is coming up fourth, Facebook is coming up fifth … and I can’t seem to get rid of Myspace. It’s coming up sixth.
Then, we’ve got another service called Onesheet, which was designed and launched by the same gentleman who coded ArtistData, which is another great tool for musicians.
One last thing I’d like to say to encourage entrepreneurs and developers that want to get into this space is that there is just an incredible amount of APIs and open platforms available right now for people to get their hands dirty. There are also the Music Hack Day tours put on by the Echonest that provide great opportunities to go out and meet other like-minded developers. They go on in all the major urban areas: San Francisco; Boston; New York; London; etc. Great tools for musicians and consumers alike are coming out of those events.
To learn more about Todd Tate and the work he does within the music space, visit his official website. Also, check out his blog entry about search engine optimization and social media optimization for musicians trying to get more visibility for their music here. Todd is available to assist SF Bay Area high-growth digital music or media companies in a business / community development role as well as vetting web based music tech companies for forward thinking VC firms.
Take a look at the SF MusicTech Summit, held this year on Monday, February 13 and register at the following link: http://sfmts10.eventbrite.com/. Tickets are currentley around $200, but you can get a discount by typing in the code (promotoddtate).
Chris Woods is the Executive Vice President and COO of TuneSat, a technology-based service that offers a solution to the problems of inaccurate performance reporting, lost royalty payments and copyright infringement within the music space. A graduate of Berklee School of Music and a proficient musician, composer, engineer and producer with over 15 years of industry experience, Chris has created music branding packages for many television networks, including Fox Sports, Versus, Comcast, Fuel and Big Ten. He co-founded TuneSat in 2007 along with Scott Schreer and has helped build the company’s technology offering, including surveying, acquisition and development of audio fingerprinting algorithms. Chris is also a regular speaker at industry events, including CMJ, the Billboard Film & TV Music Conference, the NARM Convention and the CISAC Copyright Summit.
I recently spoke to Chris about his experience in music and technology, how TuneSat works for artists and some sound advice he has for musicians that want to get their music placed in film, television and on the Internet.
Thanks so much for speaking with me, Chris. How did you get involved in the music industry, and how did the idea for TuneSat come about?
CW:
Like a lot of people who are in the music industry as performers, musicians or artists, I got started at an early age. I played guitar and piano growing up and played in rock bands. After a couple semesters in college I decided I wanted to work in music, but I didn’t want that career to be traveling around in a band with a bunch of smelly dudes working for $50 a day. I decided I’d like to get a better understanding of the music industry and get involved in a way that wasn’t just trying to be a rock star – and ended up at Berklee in the late 90’s. Outside of music, I have a real passion for technology, so I studied a lot of the music technology programs and majored in music synthesis. I learned a lot about creating things like reverb algorithms and effects. Berklee is a great place to develop a large understanding for the tech side of music and audio.
When I graduated, I came to New York and got a job as an engineer and producer at a jingle company. While I was there I met and worked with Scott Schreer, who has a rich past in the music business. He had a vision to automate how music on TV is reported to PROs and used Watermark technology to learn how much music was reported correctly with the current manual process. Using a production music catalog that he owned, we tracked the performances on TV for a couple of years and found that of half a million detected performances, less than 20% made it to a cue sheet. So, we really had a lot of information by using that catalog that showed a huge discrepancy in how music is used vs. how much is actually reported to PRO’s.
So, your product really brings to task not so much the PROs but the people who report to the PROs.
CW:
Exactly. It just highlights a broken link in the chain. It’s not really the PROs that are at fault here. It’s the mechanism of reporting. It’s a manual process and the same process that it was when they started almost a century ago. It’s still a paper business, which seems kind of crazy in this day and age, when you have all this technology that can do it for you.
We wanted to move away from watermarking in 2004, because we knew it wasn’t the end-all-be-all. The problem with watermarking is that it’s a “going forward” technology, and only recordings that have the watermark embedded in them will be detected. So, let’s say I watermark the White album today, only versions with that watermark will be detected. Everything that’s been in distribution will never be detected. Fingerprinting solves this issue.
Sure. It’s dependent on an additive. And because of the Internet, things are spread everywhere. So there’s no guarantee you’ll get even a percentage of the marketplace.
CW:
Yes. Fingerprinting has been around for a while. But before, it was cost prohibitive, because it’s very memory and CPU intensive. Around 2004, the cost started going down on hardware, and it became a viable solution.
We scoured the universe testing with every major and minor fingerprint technology out there at the time. The benchmark for the technology we needed was that it would have to find the music in a highly dirty audio environment and calculate the amount of time it played, because for the most part music performances on TV play by duration. In sports broadcasting, half the time you can’t even tell music is playing because there’s so much extra noise and it’s so low in the mix.
After months of testing with various technologies, we found a guy in France who had developed the holy grail of audio fingerprinting algorithms – Sylvain Demongeot. His particular fingerprint algorithm was by far the most robust we’d ever tested, and had the ability to detect music in as few as three seconds, even in a dirty audio environment such as crowd noise, voiceovers, or sound effects. We brought him into the fold and started developing what would ultimately become TuneSat.
And how does the business work?
CW:
It’s a subscription-based company. Anyone can join: small, medium, or large. We charge a monthly subscription fee based on the number of songs you put into the system and the territories you want to track. We expanded in the fall of 2009, built another data center outside of Paris, and started monitoring broadcasting in France, UK, Germany and Italy.
A little more than a month ago, we added eight new countries to our monitoring lineup: Spain; The Netherlands; Austria; Switzerland; Sweden; Denmark; Norway; Finland. It was a pretty large expansion for us.
We also developed a platform on our website where anybody can go and sign up anytime and anywhere, by picking which territories to monitor, the number of songs they want to put into their account, upload their files and push a button to fingerprint it. Clients can then get access to their TuneSat account and near-real-time detection data. The detections typically come in within an hour after the broadcast. We provide the date, time, channel, show, episode, number of plays, and more.
Is this a product geared more towards people who have larger libraries and a significant income from sync? Or is your average guy in a band going to benefit from this?
CW:
The size of the catalog really doesn’t matter. We have clients with 10 tracks in the system and clients with 250,000 tracks. Our clients represent a really wide range. You can see a good sampling of them on our website at www.tunesat.com/clients
So what would be the benefit of opening a TuneSat account for people that fit into the category of what you mentioned before – “a bunch of smelly dudes” just scraping by, touring in a van?
CW:
That’s part of the expanded services. We used to have larger tiers as a minimum in our system – starting at 50 tracks. Now our entry tier is “up to 10 tracks,” which starts at $10 per month. For that amount, you can upload and track 10 songs on television all across the U.S. The value in the data is to know exactly when and where your music is being used and using that information to make sure you’re being properly paid.
We are in the midst of launching an Internet monitoring service, which will expand our client base. What about all the people that don’t have music on TV, but they’re YouTube stars, or they just want to know who’s using their music and where it is. We’ll be monitoring millions of websites for the use of our clients’ music and we’ll provide them with the URLs and contact information when an identification is made.
Musician Coaching:
I would imagine you’re also drilling down on places where people do get paid.
CW:
Absolutely. I’ve been on a number of panels recently where the hot topic is the future of music and the Internet. It’s funny, because a lot of the societies still refer to it as “new media.” And it’s a 20-year old platform. The societies are still struggling to find ways to collect the licensing fees and make the distributions to the right people. It’s a real problem and a real challenge and the only way to solve it is through technology. That’s why we’re getting into the Internet monitoring space – to provide valuable information to the people who either own or administer audio content on the internet specific to music.
It’s just a gut feeling – and I don’t know if you would know this – but I can’t imagine there isn’t a fair amount of fear at PROs surrounding the idea that if they suddenly became accountable for everything that was being played in perfect clarity, there would be no more float; they wouldn’t be able to afford the payments. Is this true?
CW:
I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a highly disruptive technology, and there is a lot of fear.
And I’m not looking to stir the pot too much. But it is a question that begs answering: How has the technology been received, and how are you guys dealing with that?
CW:
I think the problem is, as you said earlier, that there’s fear: “What about the current system? What happens to that, and how do we transition?” They don’t know. They’ve been trying to figure this out for probably 10-15 years now.
We’ve continued to bring this technology to societies not just domestically, but also internationally. We’ve said, “Here’s a better way to do it.” It’s more transparent, more accountable, and almost instantaneously delivers the detection results. This is a better way to track music usage, and not just for television. As we move into the future, and TV and radio license fees start to drop because licensing fees are being moved over to the internet, they’re going to have to find a way to license websites for the use of music in a very effective way. Otherwise, the whole system will break.
Again, there’s a lot of fear. It’s a disruptive technology, and it certainly challenges the existing business. It’s pretty much the same issue with the PROs in every country.
Musician Coaching:
Are people gaining any traction by having these reports in their hands when they approach PROs to collect royalties?
CW:
Absolutely. We don’t tell people to use TuneSat as a weapon; they should use it as a tool. We have applications that compare digital royalty statements to TuneSat detections. These delta reports show everything that was detected that was not a part of their royalty distribution, which TuneSat clients can use to go file claims with their local society. Right now we’re doing this for four different societies – ASCAP, BMI, PRS and GEMA. We’ll soon add the other societies for the countries we monitor. Our clients have been very successful in using the data to fix the problem, which is the lack of reporting, under reporting and false reporting. The challenges in manual cue sheet reporting are vast.
That’s fantastic. I had no idea how it was being received, or if people were seeing it as voodoo.
CW:
It’s been received well, and we’re not only supplying time-stamped information. We also supply recordings of every captured detection as proof-positive of the use. It’s irrefutable proof. If I capture my song playing on a commercial, I have a recording as proof.
Wow. I didn’t realize that. That’s great.
CW:
Being able to supply recordings of it is a key part of the business. Not only do our clients use it to check their royalty statements and for the business intelligence, but they also monitor for copyright infringement. It’s a much larger problem than we ever thought it would be on television. Obviously, it’s rampant on the Internet. But you’d think broadcasters, production companies and ad agencies would protect themselves more. They really don’t.
The typical TuneSat user finds unlicensed uses within the first couple weeks of service. Then they have the data to go out and take action.
Which of course puts you in an advantageous position.
CW:
Our mission is to empower the rights owners. That’s really what it’s all about.
As somebody who gets his music placed and is also an expert at making sure it gets found, aside from using TuneSat, are there lessons you’ve learned the hard way that you would impart to musicians looking to get their music placed?
CW:
Yes. I’d say for musicians looking to get their content placed or who are just starting out in the music space and looking to get music placed on TV, the most important things are:
To learn more about Chris Woods and his company, visit the TuneSat website.
Scott Ambrose Reilly is the head of U.S. expansion at X5 Music Group, a Stockholm-based non-traditional music label that licenses the catalogs of approximately 50 other companies and repackages the recordings into compilations designed for the digital space. Scott got his start in the industry as a fan and spent years following his favorite artists, particularly Mojo Nixon, as they went on tour. In the late ‘80s, he was hired as Nixon’s road manager, eventually moving onto manage him and many other artists throughout the ‘90s. Through his management duties of jam band God Street Wine, he became an early adopter of the online music movement and was responsible for one of the first band websites as well as one of the first online ticketing systems in the mid ‘90s. His work in the digital space eventually led Amazon to hire him to oversee the launch of its MP3 service. Under his leadership, the company was the first to launch all four major labels in MP3 format, leading to the end of DRM. While at Amazon, he oversaw content acquisition, label relations and global operations for Amazon MP3 worldwide, building a catalog of more than 15 million tracks.
Scott recently spoke to me about the evolution of digital music, the experience of building an all-digital music label. He also delivered some advice for artists that want to successfully market themselves digitally.
Thanks so much for taking some time to talk to me, Scott. How did you get started in the music industry?
SAR:
I started in the business – as many people do – as a fan. If you’re in the music industry, either there was a particular artist that drew you in or you were a musician. I think it would be hard to fall into this business any other way.
In the late ‘80s, I found myself following around Mojo Nixon wherever he played. Then all of a sudden he needed someone to go on the road with him as his career started to take off. Since I was already at all his dates, and even the ones out of town, driving and helping load up the truck just because I wanted to be there, he figured he could con me into the position of going out as road manager and splitting a share of the proceeds at the end of each tour. And that’s what we did for a number of years. I remember the first tour was six-weeks long, and I came home with $400 for the six weeks; I thought it was the greatest thing ever.
From there, I became his manager and started managing other artists. I spent ten years managing artists through the ‘90s. The fortunate thing there is, to this day I still manage Mojo. Because he touches so many different things – radio, television, acting – it gave me great experience there. Then, I was lucky enough to manage a band called God Street Wine in the ‘90s. It was very much on the cutting edge of internet promotion and technology, mainly because of their age and where they went to school. But also, they had a fan who was a college student and was at the cutting edge of a lot of different technologies. He spent all his free time helping the band. So, we were doing internet promotions before the World Wide Web, selling tickets online and doing IRC chats backstage. We launched a website in 1994, which may have been the first band website. Without even realizing how big all this was going to be, I got to see a lot of different parts of the process that was coming up.
When I realized after ten years of full-time management that it wasn’t the right path for me, luckily I had lots of experience to translate to the digital music space.
That’s why I knew your name. I remember doing research at Lava/Atlantic under Jason Flom and trying to find out who this God Street Wine was and what they were doing with the internet.
SAR:
Yes. And I had met Jason a couple times. His wife went to college with the drummer, I think. And Dan Pifer, the bass player ended up going onto become the COO of Orchard and then the COO of Rightsflow.
One of the things I wanted to do in moving from a large, stable company like Amazon to a smaller innovative company like X5 is build the strongest possible team, because I know how important that is. So, I brought Dan Pifer on board. And Griff Morris from Amazon is our chief content officer. I felt that if I was going to do this and do it right, I needed to have the two smartest, hardest-working guys in the field alongside me. Dan came on shortly after I did. And the three of us are the U.S. office of X5 Music.
How did your other experiences lead you to XM, and what is the function of the U.S. office?
SAR:
Amazon was a great experience. There, we basically launched a DRM-free service with all the content and finally putting an end to the inoperability of digital music.
I almost feel like saying, “Thank you” for that.
SAR:
Yeah. It was part of the fun and part of the challenge. And it’s amazing how emotional that decision was for a lot of people in the music business. It seems like a pretty minor blip now in hindsight. It was great to launch that in the U.S. and in the UK, Germany, France and Japan.
X5 was one of our best vendors – this little label out of Stockholm that we hadn’t heard of, as quick, smart and flexible as any we’d seen. When we did a promotion with them, and it worked, they said, “How can we do more of these?” And they would create products within weeks for the store. I started to realize that this idea of a digital-only label that’s creating products specifically for the digital market and specifically to have mainstream appeal in the digital market had a lot of power. What the three founders in Stockholm built is very exciting. And their vision for the future is very exciting. It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s been a smart choice for me to make that jump. And the main business is licensing entire, complete catalogs from labels with rights to make compilations from those catalogs. And there’s a lot of research, science and technical stuff that goes into creating the compilations, to make them products that we can get surfaced in digital music stores – surfaced by responding well to search, by different marketing techniques we can do, by a concept that will appeal to editors of that particular store. Then, once its surfaced, we hope we’ve created an album cover and a name that’s very compelling and lets people know what it is and compels them to click on it. If you can surface it through marketing and winning the search, then you can with the click. And if you can win the click, you can have albums that stay on the Billboard Top 10 classical chart for ten years, which we’ve done.
I was just explaining to somebody the other day that I feel like this has been such an open playing field. I just don’t feel that there have always been enough products rising to the top, due to conventional SEO techniques or because they represent music for a dedicated purpose. I have been of the belief that you can create customized products that will be tailor-made to being in the stream of search. On the most macro level, that means going into the Google keyword tool and saying, “How many people are searching for music for yoga, music for meditation, or music in a certain style?” At a certain point, when you would go and see the search results for the top-ten keywords, there wasn’t necessarily a strong batch of competitors. And you still find a bunch of people squatting on domain names that have been there for a while.
SAR:
Yes. And people do spend time, money and effort studying how Google and SEO work. But I don’t know of a single company outside of X5 who looks at how that works in the iTunes Store and in the Amazon Store.
And how does that work?
SAR:
The only way to optimize for search in those stores is to create products that optimize for the search in those stores. That’s a pretty radical idea and approach. We’re creating products so that if someone types in a certain phrase, they will be the top products that pop up.
Sadly, it’s very radical in the music space. The music space is just finally growing up. Because a company like Crest might spend a million dollars determining whether or not you and I want white or off-white on our toothpaste box. Meanwhile, the music business has spent a million dollars on a video without even knowing whether there’s a market for it. So, it seems like you guys just finally got smart about it.
SAR:
Yeah. It’s easier when you don’t have a physical product and a legacy business. And it’s easier when you’re dealing with mainly catalog and not new release. So, if you’re a digital-only company focused on catalog, there’s not something else out there like that. When labels try to do this themselves, first of all, there’s a lot of marketing dollars and creative energy to spend on the back catalog, which isn’t necessarily where labels should spend their creative and financial energy. And if they’re successful, they’ll become known as a back-catalog label. Labels should spend their money and creative energy on new releases. But once those new releases are a few years old, it’s hard to find a way to market them through digital services. What we do is find a way to rise tracks, artists and concepts up to the surface in a way that it is fulfilling a customer need for people that aren’t very familiar with a particular genre.
For example, if you met a girl at a party last night, and she said she was really into World Music, so you want to get some World Music downloaded onto your computer for a playlist, and you type in “world music” at one of the music stores, it’s not going to help you. It’s going to give you Italian drinking songs, Justin Bieber albums, Glee albums, etc. And if you look at the charts, it doesn’t get much better, because you’ll find Canadian folk singers on the World Music charts.
Your vantage point is unique, as someone that has had experience growing this company, has witnessed the digital music revolution firsthand and has of course worked at Amazon. Do you have any tips on techniques for artists to make their artwork, marketing, meta data creation, etc. successful?
SAR:
It’s an easier thing to describe when it’s catalog based. Obviously if you were going to create an album of 20 great Italian love songs today – specifically for the digital market – you’d be foolish to call it Amore as opposed to 20 Great Italian Love Songs. As much as you wish you could call it Amore, people aren’t going to find it. And even if they find it, they’re not going to know what it is. But if it’s 20 Great Italian Love Songs, they’ll at least know what it is from the title. And hopefully, your cover says, “quality” to them.
We’ve tried this approach two times now with new releases. We commissioned the London Philharmonic Orchestra to record the 50 greatest classical music pieces of all time. We did a lot of research on which were the most popular classical music pieces from history based on rankings and streaming and download, etc. And it’s called The 50 Greatest Classical Music Pieces in History. And it has a cover that says, “London,” “classical” and catches your eye. It’s done incredibly well for us. It’s been a top seller at both iTunes and Amazon for two years now.
And we’re doing a second one that comes out in two weeks that’s the London Philharmonic again, and it’s titled The Greatest Video Game Music. It’s really catching fire, because it’s the concept, tied with the cover, tied with quality – because the London Philharmonic is one of the greatest orchestras in the world.
Because you had to do so much research on products like that, you must’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work for artwork, and that really applies to new artists. What have you found about artwork?
SAR:
How it looks as the 12” collector vinyl is irrelevant. Whether you wish it were the case or not, the artwork is going to be a thumbnail and has to be compelling in that format. What’s amazing is that we’ve discovered that things that are compelling as a thumbnail are also compelling as a 12” collector vinyl cover or a poster. The other way around doesn’t work.
The real message you learn when you work at Amazon – because you can’t have a meeting where this doesn’t come up – is “How does this affect the customer?” What’s the customer point of view and what’s the customer experience? And this is important in digital music.
Also, the recording process is phenomenal. It’s probably my favorite thing in the whole music business – being around when a record is being made. I was fortunate enough before I worked at X5 to be in London when the London Philharmonic was recording the 50 Greatest. It was just fun to be there for a couple hours. But listening to it in the speakers and getting excited about the big artwork is not where the customers are nowadays. As an artist, you have to think about where these customers are listening to their music, purchasing their music and experiencing their music. And you have to think about what that interface looks like and sounds like.
I remember when we first started doing online MP3s in the mid-‘90s with God Street Wine. Nobody was happy with the quality. They would say, “This doesn’t sound as good as a CD.” And I really thought that was going to impeded the growth of the digital download. I thought the quality was going to have to get better. But that turned out not to be the case; people wanted convenience more, which was a big eye opener. In the digital space, convenience is a huge quality component for people.
There are a lot of people who wish the world were still vinyl: The artwork was phenomenal and the sound was different.
Well, and it’s really hard to roll a joint on an MP3.
SAR:
Yes. It is. But I think we gave up that whole fight with the CD. I don’t get any tactile pleasure from a CD. Just accept the reality that this is how people are listening to music. If you wish people were sitting and looking at the liner notes while they listen to the music instead of streaming it as they’re walking down the street, you have to remember that you don’t get to make that choice for your fans. You’re not going to convince somebody to go buy a CD if that person gets all music digitally as downloads. You’re not going to convince people to download your album if they do all their listening through Spotify. You’re not going to change that customer behavior.
So, what can artists do to make themselves successful other than put themselves in the customer mindset?
SAR:
I don’t think the path is any different. I think the definition of “success” has evolved. The path is, to just do as much hard work as you can possibly do. I recently came across the ledger book from 1987 on the road with Mojo Nixon. The number of $50 gigs that were being played was amazing. Looking at this book 20 years later, you’d say, “That’s insane. How could that possibly ever amount to anything?” There would be a $50 dates in Bloomington Indiana. And then you’d see an $800 gig shortly after that and think, “Wow, something’s going on here.” Mojo Nixon worked hard for no money, because he had no choice. Music was what he was going to do.
And that’s all you can do as an artist. You can’t catch your lucky breaks by never taking any chances or by being so concerned about protecting all your rights. You can catch your lucky breaks by saying, “This is what I’m going to do, and I don’t care. I’m going to buck all the trends.” Your chances are less, but you can. And you better be genius. You have to be a world-shaking genius of the Elvis/Beatles variety, and you have to be at the right place at the right time – because you can take any brilliant artist in a time period three or four years earlier or later, and it doesn’t happen for them.
If you’re world-shaking genius, just do your own thing. Don’t worry about the album cover. There were a small number of bands that were very successful during the MTV years without making videos. There are always those that buck the trend. But there’s also the belief that you can grow slowly, build your career just a little bit at a time and be smart and try to make a living doing it.
So, what’s happening next at X5?
SAR:
The main thing that ties back into the concepts we’ve been talking about is this new release of The Greatest Video Game Music. The record was finished September 23. Within weeks, we realized we had something special. It came from us taking the science that X5 has done so brilliantly in Sweden with concept, design, naming and packaging, the A&R concept of getting the right song and finding the right artist to make it. We took that science and laid it on this product that people have a lot of passion for. And there’s a certain science to the packaging in digital. But there better be real art and passion that sits underneath it if you want to hold people’s attention.
We feel this project is so special that we are going to put it out physically, having never put out a physical release as a digital-only label. It’s not easy to put out your first physical title. And it’s certainly not easy to put it out during the fourth quarter when you’ve missed every possible deadline for the Christmas holidays.
Oh, I empathize.
SAR:
It shows all signs of doing something special when it comes out in a couple weeks. But it’s taking a lot of hard work to take this potential and turn it into something real. And of course, we have no way of knowing if it’s going to be as special as we think it is going to be. And we think it’s going to sell. It’s already getting a lot of press, attention and pre-orders.
When you create that product that has that potential, you better start working really hard. I don’t know that I’ve worked harder on a release even when I managed bands than I have on this one in the last five weeks. And it wouldn’t have had a chance of seeing the light of day if all of us in the U.S. and in Sweden weren’t working this hard on it.
So, it’s still true in the Digital Age that a “hit” just feels different.
SAR:
Yeah. People are drawn to it.
Doors that weren’t there suddenly open, and it feels fundamentally different. I was lucky enough to be standing at least close enough to a hit to appreciate that.
SAR:
The snowball starts to roll. This wouldn’t be a “hit” by the definition of what a “hit” would’ve been when you were working at Lava. But it’s different for every artist. For example, with Mojo Nixon, you knew “Elvis is Everywhere” was changing his life. That alone wouldn’t have done it. The hard work he laid on top of it was why it succeeded.
A hit opens doors to the next level. But you better work really hard to get through those doors. And then you better earn your keep once you’re there.
To learn more about Scott Ambrose Reilly and to get details about the release of The Greatest Video Game Music, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, visit the X5 website. You can also pre-order the compilation on Amazon.
Matthew Sutton is the co-founder of SheetMusic, LLC and co-creator of iSheetMusic, the world’s first dynamic mobile sheet music app, which launched for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad on July 22, 2011. Matthew has spent almost 40 years working on technology in various industries and started his first company – a guitar amp repair business – when he was 17. Through that company, he became the primary audio tech for recording, broadcast and live facilities in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and 1980s. He built and maintained studios for artists including Steve Miller, Heart and Paul Allen and for companies such as Microsoft. When he left the music business in the 1980s, he transitioned to the world of computer technology and has built many IT, internet service and software companies.
I recently got to talk to Matthew about his work in the music industry, how iSheetMusic came to be and how the app works.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me, Matthew. How did you get into the music industry?
MS:
I was very fortunate as a teenager to meet and work with a number of different musicians in a technical capacity; I’m a real tech guy, not a music guy. I started my first business when I was 17 fixing guitar amps for people. That business grew, and I became the top audio tech in Seattle for all the recording studios during the 70s and 80s. When Paul Allen wanted a studio in his house, I got the call and went over and built a studio in his house. I worked with Steve Miller for many years. I built many studios for Steve and toured with him. And it was great, because I met a lot of people, had a lot of great experiences. But as I got older, it became less fun. So, I kind of got out of the music business back in 1990 and got into computers, software and the internet.
Then a couple years ago, a good friend of mine who plays music, Matt Mostad, came to see me and said, “Why can’t I carry my sheet music around on my iPhone like I do the rest of my music?” And I said, “That’s a great idea.” So, we started a business together and began working on building the app and working on licensing issues. I was fortunate I did have experience in the music business, working with everyone from street musicians to the guys that could fill stadiums. And I had an appreciation for the licensing aspects of dealing with sheet music. So, when I approached Hal Leonard about licensing the catalogue, the discussion was a good one, because I understood that they’re in the business of making money and paying royalties, and I wanted to support that. We spent some time and developed a rapport and put together a deal where we had access to their catalogue. And this is great, because they’ve spent the last 15 years digitizing their catalogue, so they have tens of thousands of pieces of sheet music in a format very similar to what we need for our app. It makes it very easy for us to use that catalogue.
That sounds fantastic. I know a lot of sheet music haven’t gone through that digitization process, and it’s really difficult to get that moved around. I tried to get stuff moved around for a tablature company a few different times and discovered that a lot of people just haven’t taken that digital step.
MS:
And another licensor that we’re dealing with is Alfred Music. We’re also talking to others. But Alfred doesn’t have their content in digital format, so we’ve been transcribing music. I have a staff that’s in here doing that right now so we’ll have that to use as well. And it’s a certain amount of work, but it’s a good investment for our business model.
Is there much of a market for the sheet music of smaller musicians? I know you’re still a new company, but looking into the marketplace, how much sheet music comes from extraordinarily well-known people and how much comes from people who are just developing, or independent artists?
MS:
I don’t know the specifics of the numbers. I just know the big numbers. Sheet music is a half-a-billion-dollar-per-year industry. It’s a big business. A big driver for sheet music is hit songs. For example, Glee sells a lot of sheet music. A hit song can sell 50,000-100,000 pieces of music. It’s amazing.
I think for the less well-known artists, there are two limitations with sheet music. One is publishing and distribution. That’s one combo that makes it difficult for a less well-known artist. The other is just getting their music into a proper form so it can be published as sheet music. One of the things we’re doing – not on launch, but it’s in our near-term window – that we’ve actually developed the infrastructure to support is the ability to let people self publish. An artist will be able to submit a data file to us. And if they just have it written down, or they just have it recorded, we’ll transcribe it for a fee. But then we’ll publish their sheet music online and we’ll work on our website to promote it. We really see our ability to very fluidly get music from any artist out to a large audience to be a big part of what we can do. We really intend to make that into a big deal.
When is your launch?
MS:
Launch is Friday, July 22. We’ve already been approved by Apple, we’ve been through that entire process, and we’re ready to go. I’m very excited about that.
Wow. You can certainly provide some advice on what it takes to get an app published with Apple. I’m told that’s a very difficult task.
MS:
It’s interesting. They have a very strict set of standards they want to adhere to. Some of it was challenging because there were aspects of it that didn’t really make sense. But, as with anything else, when you take a closer look at it, you say, “Okay. I see what you’re trying to do. This is what’s important to Apple. Here are the things that are important to me.” We did push back and forth with Apple on a couple different things just to allow us to grow our catalogue very quickly. They have some manual processes they wanted us to go through. We negotiated with them, and they realized we were making a valid point. So, we were able to get to market. And we’ll be able to add literally tens of thousands of songs in a day, which is great.
Wow. And I’m guessing it’s readable on all Apple devices – iPads, iPhones, iPods? And is it going to be on other platforms as well?
MS:
At launch, we’ll be on the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the iPad. We’re developing the Android platform right now for portable devices and tablets. One of the really unique things about iSheetMusic is that we just started. We designed it for the iPhone originally before the iPad even came out. So when Matt came to me and said, “Gee, wouldn’t it be really great to build this?”the first thing that came to mind for me was, “We need to license the music.” The second thing I thought was that we need to design it so it is readable on a tiny screen. We can’t just make it so you can zoom in on the world’s tiniest PDF file of a piece of sheet music. It just wouldn’t work. What we did was free the sheet music from the page. To do that, we’re using digital data files. So, every note, every line, every sharp, every flat – we’re drawing those from the data. We look at music as a set of measures. For instance, on the iPhone, in the portrait mode you can have four, five or six lines of music. If you to the landscape, you can have two or three lines of music. Then to make it really functional, we added a metronome. So, when you hit the “play” button, it will count you in. And then as you’re playing, it keeps the beat. So, it knows about where you are in the song, and it moves forward in the music for you. On the iPhone, for instance, if you have two lines of music showing, it will count through the first two lines and then will move the music up, so what was the bottom line becomes the top line, and then it adds two new lines below that. As a musician, you’re always looking ahead in the music: “I know where I am, but I have to change to an e minor chord.” We give you that capability automatically, so you can just play the music.
And I have one more question. As a guy that had a guitar amp repair company, what is the most common way people break their amps, and what should they do to avoid that?
MS:
It’s been a long time since I worked on a guitar amp. Honestly, I haven’t been inside an amp in probably 20 years. But on tube amps, let them cool down. Don’t pick them up and move them around while they’re still hot. That’s the one thing you can do that’s probably hardest on them. And the tubes are what wear out. Treat them gingerly in that regard. Since I got out of that business, the technology has gotten a lot more stable. The designers have a lot better idea of how to make amps so they’re not so fragile, and you don’t see sparks shooting out of the back of things as often as you used to. I’m sure somebody has a story, but I’m not aware of it happening as much as it used to.
That’s a good tip, because tube amps are still desirable, and there are a lot of people who still have them.
MS:
Yes. They sound great.
To learn more about Matthew’s app, visit the iSheetMusic website, or download the app directly from the iTunes store. To see how iSheetMusic works, check out the demo video below.
Jeff Levy is an entertainment attorney with 25 years of experience. His firm, Ritholz, Levy, Sanders, Chidekel & Fields works extensively with clients in the music, film, television, video game, fashion and print industries. When he entered law school at the University of Southern California (USC), he knew he wanted to work in the music industry and in film. After working for a boutique music, film and television firm in Los Angeles, he found his way back to his hometown of New York City when he was offered a position at Arista Records, and then to one of the most powerful music and entertainment law firms in the world, Grubman, Indursky & Schindler. In 1995 he joined Atlantic Records, where he ultimately became the head of Business and Legal Affairs. He has been with Ritholz, Levy, Sanders, Chidekel & Fields since 2004. The firm’s clients include Cee-Lo, Fergie, Maxwell, Lisa Loeb, Nicole Miller, Rockstar Games, Pepsi, Comedy Central, IAC, Vector Management, Artists Den Entertainment, and Petra Nemcova.
I got to sit down with Jeff recently to talk about his experience, how he thinks technology will change the face of the music industry and some advice he has for artists that want to build careers in the current climate.
Thanks for taking some time out to talk today, Jeff. I first met you when you were head of Business and Legal Affairs at Atlantic Records. How did you get into the music business?
JL:
I went to law school at USC, thinking I wanted to be either a lawyer either in the music business or in film. When I was in law school, I worked part-time jobs at a few entertainment-related firms. My first job out of law school was at Mitchell, Silverberg & Knupp which had a strong music practice. Although I couldn’t get into the music department, I got into the corporate department. I eventually become friendly with a few people in the music department, and they heard about a job at a boutique music, film and TV firm in Beverly Hills called Cooper, Epstein & Hurewitz. I got an interview there just not even a year out of law school and got a job there. I got thrown into doing producer agreements, record deals, management deals, publishing. I did a little bit of film and TV also, but it was mostly music. That’s really how I got my start.
And where did you go from there?
JL:
After about a year there, I was doing a deal with Arista Records in New York, and they were looking for a young lawyer and asked if I wanted to interview for the job. Because I was interested in the job but also a little homesick and thinking I’d like to move back to New York, I took the job interview and ended up accepting a job offer. I was there for about two and a half years when I received a job offer from Grubman, Indursky & Schindler. That firm represented mega-artists including Springsteen, Madonna, John Mellencamp, U2, Sting, etc. I was there for about five years and then went into Business Affairs. I was at Atlantic Records for about five years. I ultimately went back into private practice where I’ve been ever since.
You’ve been at this a long time, and certainly the digital landscape has changed everything. How would you say the playing field has changed with regards to what artists have to know about their rights? Are there certain things artists absolutely need to know now that distribution is not really a hurdle anymore?
JL:
I think it’s less of a rights issue (comparing recording contracts to when I first started to contracts now) than it is a threshold issue of whether or not you sign with a label, and if you do, which label you should sign with. I started practicing in the music area at the tail end of the era when a number of record companies would require you to sign a publishing deal with them when you signed a contract. They might also have insisted on a right of first refusal and a matching right on your merchandise. That was still going on in the late 1980s to some extent. That doesn’t really look too dissimilar to what they call 360 deals now – where the record companies are getting a piece of some additional income, including endorsements, touring and sponsorships. They don’t necessarily push for owning publishing rights, though some of them do take an income interest in an artists publishing. I think the real issue today is, what can a label provide an artist nowadays given that the costs of recording and distribution have gone down? And the majors are more hit driven than ever and don’t have the luxury of developing artists’ careers the way they did 20 years ago.
You have a diverse practice now – everyone from Petra Nemcova to Rockstar Games. The last time I checked you also had some rock and urban artists as well. Are you doing a high volume of record deals at this stage?
JL:
We still do a good number of record deals, but the number of record deals with major labels we do today is lower in frequency than it used to be, even compared to five years ago. We do represent artists, and some of them are high profile. Probably our most visible artist right now is Cee-Lo. But I would say that the nature of our music practice is such that we have more clients than ever that use music to sell other things. If you look at Rockstar games, music is very prevalent and an important component in their video games. We’ve represented Pepsi, and they use recording artists to help market their products.
Are you seeing music as a product that will stand on its own several years from now?
JL:
Yes, I believe so, but the difficulties for the major labels continue. Music is more popular than ever because of new technology. It’s more ubiquitous than ever because of mp3 players, the iPod, digital devices that let people connect to “the cloud”, etc. But if you think about it, go back to the time before there was the phonograph record. Music as a business was more or less just artists who performed live (and I don’t think that was much of a business). Then all of a sudden you were able to capture a performance on record and ultimately entities developed that controlled the manufacturing and distribution of albums, which was highly profitable (and incredibly profitable if you had a hit album). You have a disaggregation of all that now. People can pick and choose the songs, and the value of distribution has diminished greatly because of the digitization of music. To some extent, music has become more of a commodity and has been devalued unfortunately in a lot of ways.
Your firm is very forward thinking in that a lot of your clients are technologists, and you have a very unique vantage point as someone that was at a very senior position at a major label at a time when music was exploding in a conventional way. Are you seeing anything out there that you think is viable? Do you think music on demand and non-ownership is the future?
JL:
The hope now in the industry, at least in my view, is to turn the commoditization of music into a positive thing where we create for the consumers on-demand platforms that provide them with multiple means to access their and all music (all perhaps for a monthly fee). Labels now struggle with the fact that people are only paying 99 cents a song, and there is not a whole lot of profit in that. And I saw a survey a few years ago where young people felt on average that the cost should only be 25 cents per song. That’s really the challenge for the industry and for artists. So perhaps you can get a larger number of people who are willing to pay for access and convenience on a monthly basis.
Again in my opinion, I think the trend will ultimately be selling music via subscription. But I also think – and this is kind of controversial, and when I’ve discussed this with people at major labels, they didn’t think it was viable or possible – you need the government to step in have the internet service providers and hardware manufacturers pay something to artists/labels. Those entities have received a huge benefit from the music business to the loss of the creators of music. We’re in a capitalistic, free market society generally. But it becomes painful for me to see people at music companies that have passion for music get fired. And they’re not coming back. You have this tragedy of people trying to create value, but it’s kind of impossible because of the technology. And what happens to those labels? People generally don’t like major labels and they are under fire for having “not seen the future”, but they served a very important function. They had big research and development arms to sign artists and develop them, market and promote them. Let’s put it this way, if the movie and television business became as devastated as the record labels, I think you’d see government stop in more strongly.
Is there anything you feel modern artists should be hyper aware of, or anything you feel that is left out of their education?
JL:
In my view, artists are very special people, but one of the things I’ve noticed over the 25 years I’ve been doing this is that they’re very susceptible to getting involved with and seduced by people who will tell them exactly what they want to hear. They don’t necessarily do the right research on their manager, label, lawyer or agent. If you’re looking at working with a manager, agent or a lawyer or signing with a label, it’s not just about who they represent or who they’ve signed. That’s not necessarily relevant. You have to try to educate yourself on the business the best way you can and try to be with advisors that understand the business as a business in addition to having good relationships. You don’t want to enter into long-term agreements with people who are promising you the world, are great at manipulation and really can’t deliver. I think that’s an important point. The other issue is, when you have dreams of becoming a successful artist, what kind of shot do you give yourself? Planning for the future is important. There are great vicissitudes, great ups and downs in one’s career. If you make some money, are you going to be able to continue to make that money five, ten, 15, 20 years out? How do you plan for the inevitable decline in your popularity? Some artists are talented and lucky enough that they can keep going forever. But there are moments in time where certain artists strike a chord with the public and they never regain the same popularity they once had. As an artist, you have to build the right team around you to maximize your business and try to keep it as sustainable as possible.
And, this is the flip side to what I was saying about the internet that may be the best news for artists: If they can build a core fan base, they can now link directly one-to-one with fans and on an independent basis sell records, merchandise and tickets to them. I think that’s more sustainable than it used to be. From that standpoint, they’re less at the mercy of big companies.
To read more about Jeff, his background and his continued work in the music industry, please visit the Ritholz, Levy, Sanders, Chidekel & Fields website.
Andrew Dreskin is the co-founder of Ticketfly, Inc., a web-based ticketing and marketing company that leverages social media to help venues and promoters manage live events. He also co-founded the Virgin Mobile Festival, a multi-day music and arts festival on the East coast of the U.S. that originated in England. A graduate of Tulane University, he got his start in college in the early 1990s where he promoted concerts at a variety of local clubs in New Orleans. He then went onto work as the executive vice president of Beserkley Records, an independent record label that put out albums by artists such as Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and The Greg Kihn Band. He also helped start Energy Media, an early web design firm, and acted as co-founder, president and C.E.O. of TicketWeb, the first Internet-based event ticketing company, which was acquired by Ticketmaster in 2000. Before it was acquired by Knitting Factory Entertainment, Andrew was the largest outside shareholder in the Big Easy Concert House, a chain of concert venues in the Pacific Northwest.
I recently had the opportunity to talk to Andrew about the experience of being a big part of the technological revolution in the music industry, his views on the future of live events and web ticketing and what artists can do to sell more tickets and get more out of touring.
Thanks so much for taking some time to talk to me. How did you get involved in technology and the music industry?
AD:
I started promoting concerts in college in New Orleans at Tulane. I promoted my first concert at Tipitina’s in 1990. My first job in the record business was at Beserkley Records, which was responsible for Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and The Greg Kihn Band. Matthew King Kaufman, the head of Beserkley had restarted the label, and I became the general manager.
In 1993 or 1994, I read an article on the cover of Billboard about one of the big record labels at the time, and I can’t remember whether it was Geffen or A&M, but they had just set up this thing called a website. And I got very excited about the idea of the digital transmission of music over the internet. The light bulb went off as I was reading that article, and I thought, “Someday, people will less frequently go to the record store, and will buy records and transmit them digitally.” I went out and bought a CD burner and an ISDN line. At that point it was sort of like, “Hurry up and wait.” I was obviously a little before my time there. Then, I went and met the guys at the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA). Anyone who was in music or around in the early days of the internet remembers IUMA, which was the developer of that website for Geffen or A&M. I met with those guys, and we ended up putting up a Beserkley website. I became very friendly with the guy that worked there, and we splintered off and set up a small web design shop to develop websites largely for music industry companies. We did some early work for the band Midnight Oil, and we streamed the Monsters of Rock tour and did some other stuff. Through that process, I met a guy named Rick Tyler, who was developing the world’s first web-based ticketing system. Rick and I became partners and founded TicketWeb in 1995. And ultimately, we sold the business to Ticketmaster in 2000.
And what did you do after 2000?
AD:
The next big idea I had – or what I thought was a big idea – was to establish European-style music festivals on the East coast of the U.S. I moved back to New York from the Bay Area with my wife, who ended doing her residency at NYU. I, along with Seth Hurwitz, who is the operator of the Merriweather Post Pavilion and the owner of the 9:30 Club, and in conjunction with Virgin, brought the V Festival over from England. That’s been a whole lot of fun. We’ve done the Virgin Mobile Festival for five years, and this will be our sixth year, in Maryland.
In 2007, some of the old TicketWeb crew reached out to me and said, “Hey, we want to get the band back together. We think there’s a tremendous opportunity not being met in event ticketing, really centered around social marketing and a more integrated platform to create efficiencies and reduce costs.” So, we founded Ticketfly in 2008.
And that was really to answer the fact that you didn’t feel like the 800-pound gorillas were active in social networking or fan activation?
AD:
That’s right. Social media was just burgeoning, and we didn’t feel like any of the big ticketing players were really acknowledging the opportunity sufficiently. They weren’t really harnessing social media on behalf of their clients. That was one of the major prongs of the thesis that caused us to found Ticketfly.
And is it mostly a service for venue owners and promoters?
AD:
Yes. The service is primarily geared towards venues and promoters. But we have been dabbling with some artist ticketing here and there as well.
From your vantage point, as a guy who has booked major festivals and worked with live music and ticketing for a very long time, what would you say artists are and aren’t doing to be successful at selling tickets? What would you say have you learned about this from running a ticketing company that has leveraged social media so well?
AD:
I would say frankly it’s a little complicated for artists, because the way ticketing industry is set up in the U.S. is that it is largely based on exclusive relationships between the venues and the promoters and the ticketing companies. There is a generally-accepted position that artists can sell 8% or 10% of their tickets at a venue. I think one very good way for an artist to create a connection with his/her fans and create interest in shows is to set up either fan club ticketing or tour ticketing and attempt to sell a portion of the house to fans.
What are you going to be doing with the company going forward? Is it going to be opening it up to more venues or the longer-tail concept? Where do you see the ticketing industry going?
AD:
Our first order of business is to continue to concentrate on being the best provider of web-based tool for venues and promoters, who are our primary focus. Most of the ticketing players out there are just ticketing players, but we think of ourselves slightly differently. We view ourselves as an enterprise technology provider for a venue. What I mean by that is that in addition to ticketing technology, we provide website technology, social marketing technology, email marketing technology, iPhone technology and those types of services. Our primary focus is to continue to build out our suite of tools for our target market. In addition, we’re examining new verticals and new geographies. We’re absolutely mulling over the best way to address artist ticketing as well.
Obviously there are more people online than when you first started TicketWeb and probably even since you started Ticketfly. Has the way people purchased tickets changed?
AD:
Yes. Our set of challenges when we started TicketWeb was very different from our set of challenges today. I tell this story a lot, and people are usually somewhere between hysterical laughing and total incredulity. The biggest challenge we had when we were founding TicketWeb was trying to convince our prospective clients that the internet was a viable medium. We had to try to convince venue owners and event promoters that people were going to transact business on the internet. It sounds far-fetched today, but at the time, we would hear things like, “No one is ever going to put their credit card in through the computer.” But the biggest change from then to today when it comes to event ticketing and live events is really social marketing. We didn’t have the same social tools available to us as ticket sellers as we have today back in the day at TicketWeb. Live events are inherently social. People go with other people. And we’re seeing that the social networks like Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare are great ways for people to connect around events. They’re also inexpensive and fun ways to market events for venues and promoters. If I had to pinpoint the biggest change between 1995 and 2011 in ticketing, I’d have to say it’s social marketing.
Do you really find that people being exposed to other people’s choices to go or not go to a concert really influences a sale?
AD:
Absolutely. We’re finding that people’s social graphs are very strong indicators of ticket buying activity. Like I said, events are social, people generally don’t go alone. We’re seeing that when folks buy a ticket and share that activity with their social graph, the result will be increased transactions a lot of the time.
The line that artists get over and over again is, “You have to tour, tour, tour.” And so few of them can find agents. As someone that has been in the live music business for a really long time, what is your vantage point? Is there room for growth in live events, or are we at a saturation point?
AD:
That’s a very complicated question. I think at the macro level what we’re seeing and feeling is that things are good, but not great. We’re not in the depths of 2008, and we’re also not in the delirious days of 1999. I think people also have a significant number of entertainment options these days, whether it’s movies, video games, the internet, TV or concerts. People are spending their money wisely and deferring purchases. They’re not waiting until the last minute like they were a couple years ago, but they’re definitely being a little more cautious and taking a little more time. We’re about to see a whole generation of performers head into retirement who historically have played stadiums and arenas. There is a movement towards smaller facilities. We’re also seeing an industry where one of the traditional sources of revenue – recorded music – is under some pressure, which is causing artists and their agents and managers to seek more live dates. I think in some ways that is leading to a little bit of saturation for sure. But I don’t think it’s yet at levels that are in the danger zone. We’re seeing the combination of a lot of factors, and the industry is trying to find its footing. I think in a few more years things will have normalized, and we’ll have a better idea of what this industry is going to look like moving forward.
To read more about Andrew Dreskin and learn about his various companies and pursuits, visit the Ticketfly and Virgin Mobile Festival websites.
David Krinsky is Head of Label Relations and Business Development at the online music subscription service Rhapsody, which now has more than 750,000 subscribers. A long-time music fan, David got his start on the retail side of the music industry, working at Tower Records and then eventually moving onto BMG Distribution. An interest in the internet as it was first taking shape revealed to him the real opportunity it presented for people to get information about smaller and developing bands that music magazines or zines might miss, and he learned web programming and helped BMG start to develop its online presence, which led to a position on the BMG online team. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s he helped build an internet presence for a variety of music companies, including GetMusic.com and RollingStone.com and RealNetworks eventually landing in his current role at Rhapsody.
I got to sit down recently with David and discuss how he got involved in the internet music industry, what sets Rhapsody apart from other music services and how DIY artists can get their music heard and get more fans in the rapidly-growing online space.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, David. First of all, how did you get into the music industry?
DK:
It’s been a slow evolution. I’ve always been interested in music. If you really want to go all the way back to the beginning, my first music job was as a clerk at Tower Records about 17 years ago, which I still consider to be one of the most fun jobs I ever had. I’m still really sad that Tower is not around anymore. After that, I stayed in the same retail vein working for BMG Distribution for a couple years. Organically at the same time, I became interested in the internet and realized companies were starting to set up websites, and it was a great way to find out information about bands that weren’t necessarily being covered in magazines or zines or were part of things that were happening overseas. I started to learn how to do web programming and started to do some web work on the side for BMG. Back in the mid to late 90s, they didn’t have a lot online yet.
Because I had built up some music experience, but also had an interest in the internet and was watching the space very closely, I got invited to join the BMG online team. That’s at the point where my career pivoted from being just music, retail and marketing to being internet specific. I’ve actually been in an internet-specific vein ever since then, moving from BMG online to GetMusic.com, which was at first a BMG project but then became a joint venture with Universal. It’s basically a music content and marketing site. I went around to a few different sites, but the next big stop after GetMusic was RollingStone.com, where I worked for a couple years. I wasn’t working on the editorial side, but I was working overseeing content and label relations on the operational side, because the magazine only really handled at that point the original content. I was in charge of getting video, audio, original performances, which I had also done a little bit at GetMusic.
And that was your introduction to content wrangling?
DK:
I actually started to do some original content work for GetMusic in 1999, some of it boiling down to me interviewing bands while I held a video camera. I can’t even imagine who would’ve been watching those interviews, because I don’t know who would’ve had the bandwidth to watch it at that point, even just as a tiny square that was just basically a talking head. Obviously doing that work at RollingStone.com was doing it on a much larger scale, interfacing with a magazine and understanding the complexities of a big, multi-platform system where people could get into what you were doing from print, web and email and diversifying my understanding of different ways to reach a consumer and different ways to get content out there. When RealNetworks took over operation of Rolling Stone I ended up migrating over from being Rolling Stone-specific to being matrixed in the RealNetworks’ organization across music properties, ultimately landing on the Rhapsody side of the fence, where I’ve pretty much been ever since. I’m still largely working more on the content promotion and the strategic marketing side of things, but I moved over into the business development side of my role about three or four years ago.
What does your job as Head of Label Relations and Business Development at Rhapsody entail?
DK:
I wear two hats that are complementary in some ways but also strangely divergent in others. I’m responsible one-half the time for the business side of label relationships – creating the deals that get label content into the Rhapsody system, both from a basic standpoint and from the standpoint of how we use it. So, when we made the service available on the mobile platform, that was something we had to make sure was within the rights of our deals. We had to get everything in line there. I make sure we have enough content in our system and that our users can access it. On the other hand, the other half of the role is managing the actual relationships with the labels, working on marketing opportunities, making sure that beyond the core deal itself we get in as much content as we can and promote it and do outreach and let fans know about opportunities. We also help our editorial team to create original content for our users, whether that’s interviews or some of the other special features we do within the service. That’s who I oversee, along with a small team that is scattered across the country.
From an outsider’s perspective, there have been all these talks with Pandora and Spotify coming and going. And it seems that Rhapsody is out there continuing to offer more streaming music and growing very quietly into a very reliable service. The last few times I was on it, it didn’t miss, even when I tried to stump it with some obscure queries.
DK:
I think that’s the byproduct of really having been so early in the space and having had a lot more time to pick up the licenses. A lot of people now try to shortcut and do a couple different deals that grab all the content. We actually wound up going and getting hundreds of individual label deals. I think we have more individual label deals than anyone other than perhaps iTunes. Because of that, you see us having catalogues you don’t find in a lot of other services, like Discord and Warp Records. Some of these labels have migrated from different back ends to newer back ends, and not all the content has made it with them. And because we’ve been around for so long, we have some titles from different labels that I know they don’t have the ability to redeliver to anyone else, because it got lost somewhere along the way, and we just happen to have it from back in the day. Our longevity has really been one of the things that’s benefited our catalogue and in turn what users can get from us. We want people to find what they’re looking for, and all this gives us a good leg up to actually deliver on that.
I know there’s concern from people that are very ensconced in the way music is bought and sold about the shift over to streaming and not really owning anything. They wonder what it really is going to mean when everything is on demand. What are you seeing in that space, and how soon are we at a reality where people won’t need to own music?
DK:
I think we try to be aggressive in the space by doing a lot of the portable device integrations. We’ve done a lot of things in the past few years with SanDisk, Philips and others. It’s really been our pivot to mobile in the last year or so where we’ve really been able to give people an experience through mobile that actually excels beyond the ownership experience. When you own tracks, the only way you have them with you is if you put them on your device and load them up in a way where you can access them. It’s a very manual process that at the end of the day still only leaves you with what you’ve specifically purchased for yourself. Our catalogue is infinitely bigger than what people can grab for themselves, even if they’re using P2P. We make it effortless for them to listen to that music on their PCs, home audio devices, through certain TVs and set-top boxes as well. But it’s really the ability to take your smartphone – your Android phone, iPhone, Blackberry and now even Windows Mobile – and log into our catalogue and access any track. If I tell you right now about a band I’m obsessed with, you can go and listen to those tracks on your phone and take them with you as well. That’s not something you can do with tracks you own; you can’t expand on them openly. We’re finally being able to deliver a superior experience to ownership. I think the ease of the use, particularly with the combination of our new website and the enhancements we continue to make to our mobile phone apps make the whole experience easy, seamless. Our catalogue and the way we’re allowing people to access it is really what the users want. It’s something you can’t duplicate with owned content. You can only do it with a long-term and more robust library.
We’ve also optimized the format of that music based on the device you’re using to listen to it. If you’re on your mobile phone, you’re going to get it at a different bit rate than if you’ve downloaded it or are listening to it at home. On the other hand, if you’ve purchased the track in a certain format or quality, that’s what you’re going to get no matter where you are, for better or for worse.
Do you think the music in a cloud services that Google and Apple are working on will catch on?
DK:
It’s so hard to say, because there’s so much conjecture about what Apple and Google are going to come out with, and no one knows what the effect and value is going to be. It does seem to be centered around purchased content, your existing library or some combination of the two, which does give you more flexibility than you have now. But it’s not going to be as much flexibility as what we offer. I think, not knowing what they’re going to have in detail, the only thing we can say is that in a sense we’re not particularly anxious about those companies entering the space, because at a bare minimum they’re still going to educate people about accessing through the cloud, freeing people from the notion that their content can only live in one particular place and that where it lives is the anchor. I think helping people understand that there’s more flexibility than they currently enjoy is a positive. Because we can offer people a broad and flexible catalogue, I think it’s easier for us to take that education they may provide to some people and explain the value of what we’re providing. So, ultimately, it’s hard to say what will happen without knowing what Google and Apple will come out with, but the education alone should be helpful for us.
You implied there’s a certain amount of editorial space, and you’re working with labels in a promotional capacity. Does any of that extend to developing artists? Are you making space for the currently massive DIY movement?
DK:
Absolutely. It is hard because there is so much content coming to the space. We ingest thousands and thousands of tracks every day of the week. It’s a crowded space, but one of the things that sets us apart from other services is that we do have a full-time editorial team that is writing about albums and artists and creating associations and maintaining the hundreds of genres we have. If you want to make things really easy and just look at pop artists, you can do that. But we also have detailed sub-genres and sub-sub genres like shoegaze and Italian pop – all kinds of really niche categories that help people find exactly what they’re looking for.
Is that information available in front of the pay wall or behind the pay wall?
DK:
Through our website you can see any of the editorial content, including the genre and sub-genre breakdown and editorial content. So, you can see the original pieces, album descriptions or recommendations on each album and artist. It’s really only the content playback that’s behind the pay wall. Everything is geared towards you listening to whatever track you start with, whether it’s music you looked for or a track we presented to you on our home page or that you saw in an email. We want to take you from that first track to more content in one way or another. The editorial team is really dedicated to giving people next places to go to after they’ve listened to a track, album or artist. That’s what helps people get deeper into the catalogue and explore a lot more things that aren’t just Britney Spears or Rihanna top-of-the-chart-type artists. If you look, you’ll actually find we have a more diverse Top 100 artist list than many other services. There’s a lot more catalogue and a lot more indie. At the same time, we have done some analysis to show that the Top 100 artists represent less of our activity than virtually any other way of accessing music. The Top 100 means more to iTunes and P2P than it does to us. Our editorial and interface is optimized to getting people deeper in the system, and that in turn gives more opportunities for smaller, developing and niche artists to be discovered and listened to. A lot of the different editorial genre features help with that. We do new music indie reviews where we’ll do ten new releases for a week or two-week period. It takes people beyond the most obvious release in whatever that sub-category is and gives them a deeper look. I think it helps expose a lot of artists and releases that might not get a look in other places.
You’ve worked with a lot of different apps that have been music and internet related. And you’ve worked peripherally if not directly with a lot of artists that have succeeded. Do you have any insight as to what has made people successful in music either on the executive or the musician side?
DK:
On the musician side, I think a lot of it comes down to knowing how to connect with your fans. I don’t think it’s necessarily being on Twitter or Facebook every five minutes, but you should be on those outlets or sending out band emails enough. You need to engaged enough so the fan can perceive a sense of connection with the artist. I think giving the fan a lot of easy ways to connect with you will make them more likely to do it. Make it easy for them to follow you on Twitter, friend you on Facebook, sign up for your mailing list. I know that even I get frustrated when I’m interested in a band and I figure, “I’d love to see them if they ever come through town,” but there’s no mailing list or anything else. I may not remember to go check back on them again. The easier you make it, the more likely you’re going to be able to make a connection. I think you also need to make it easy for fans to know where they can find you, whether that’s in a live setting or listening to different services. There might be a couple tracks on MySpace, but then what? Let people know they can listen to your whole record on Rhapsody before they go out and buy it if that’s something they want to do. You need to let people know the different outlets where you can be found.
So, I think making it easy for the fan to find you and making them feel a sense of connection are very important on the musician side. You need to know there are a lot of different tools at your disposal. All an artist has to do is sign up and get a release out through TuneCore or CDBaby, and, just like that, their release is available in iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody and all these other different services. Each of those services is potentially another way to be discovered.
On more of the business side of music, it’s really about trying to be aware of different trends and knowing what’s working in the business today but also trying to keep your eye on what might work tomorrow, because it is such a quickly-changing space. You need to have a love for music, because it is a difficult space to work in right now. Having it be something you’re passionate about helps the drive. And you need to use that drive to be a really hard worker. To really be effective in the music business today, you need to be willing to put in nights, weekends or extra hours in some way or another to get stuff done and get ahead. It can be daunting, but if you love of music is driving you forward, it makes it easier.
To learn more about David Krinksy and what Rhapsody is doing for subscribers and artists, please visit the Rhapsody website. You can also follow David on Twitter.
