heute:pop:blog.  

photo by bungalowbrian

For a few years now ‘ad supported’ have been the big buzz words within the digital music industry and many new companies that are using recorded music have their business model based on the fact that they will become very popular and then ‘sell the attention’ of their users to advertisers. This is not a bad business model and for TV and commercial radio this is very sustainable and has been for many years.

The problem is at the moment that the online advertising market is not as developed as the more traditional markets which essentially means that advertisers do not spend enough money online to actually sustain all the new businesses that are starting up. One other thing to keep in mind is that licensing recorded music is a very expensive business and one has to sell a lot of ads to get a profit out of it.

Now we might have something called ‘recession’. Even though it’s impossible to predict what is going to happen next year it now looks like the online ad market might not be growing as much as hoped, in fact it might be getting smaller as big brands cut back on their marketing spending. If you run an online music service right now it might be very tricky for you to make enough money through advertising next year. This makes me think that a lot of businesses might be looking at subscriptions again and to see if this is a better model for them to be able to pay the rent next month.

What we have to keep in mind is that advertising and subscriptions have been the two big income sources for the media sector for many years and just because the medium is going digital this is not going to change. Often media owners combine the two (I have to pay for my magazine subscription and will see ads in there) and this will continue to happen online.

The ‘freemium’ model (where the service is free but you have to pay for extras) seems to be successful for some companies like Flickr whereby others might be focusing on subscription only services. If you know who your audience is that this can make a lot of sense. Looking at the new Soundcloud service for example you can see that they want to focus on professional music makers only and see them as their customers (even though they have a free service too).

I have the feeling that the (potentially) tough advertising market next year will make companies think twice about who they want as their paying customers: advertisers or their users.

1. The Great Northwest ‘Chief John’
2. Her Space Holiday ‘Sleepy Tigers’
3. Horse Feathers ‘Finch On Sunday’
4. Chad VanGaalen ‘Willow Tree’
5. The Dodos ‘Winter’
6. Greg Weeks ‘Borderline’
7. Euros Childs ‘Farm Hand Murder’
8. Manchester Orchestra ‘I Can Feel A Hot One’
9. Ivana XL ‘The King’
10. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire ‘Voice in Headphones’
11. Nic Bommarito ‘Song For Runner-Up’
12. Boo And Boo Too ‘No Tempo’
13. Maps & Atlases ‘Artichokes’
14. Daft Punk ‘Human After All’ (SebastiAn Remix)
15. Talking Heads ‘Psycho Killer’ (live at Sun Palace, Tokyo 1981)

You can listen to all this here.

As mentioned in my show:

• Find more information on Wichita here: www.wichita-recordings.com
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If you are in London tomorrow (28th October) make sure you come down to the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes as we’ll be hanging out the the guys that are in town for the Musexpo.

Organized by Topspin and Songkick we’ll be having food and drinks (White Russian optional) from around 8.30. For more info check Ian’s blog post. See you there.

As you might know I attend a lot of conferences. After years of doing this the excitement wears off and it often becomes just part of the job. Fortunately, I really enjoy travelling so even when the conference does not turn out to be a success you’re still in a different environment which is something you will always gain something from. If you’re not then you’re not travelling the right way.

For this one I am excited though: I just confirmed my ticket for the Transmission conference which takes place in Vancouver this year in the first week of December. This has been highly recommended to me by Sean Adams who was saying this is one of the best industry conference he’s ever been to. And he is going to a lot of those.

The Transmission guys are approaching this gathering of people from the music and technology sectors differently and I think I’m going to enjoy this as

• it’s limited to 200 people (I feel a intimate setup makes it easier to connect to people)
• there seems to be a tight schedule of interesting talks and round tables (being German a good organization is something I always appreciate
• it sounds like we will have people talking from outside our industries (I get bored by hearing the same people talking about the same topics so this could be very refreshing)
• I expect the topics to be very high level and therefore educating (again, you often hear the same things at panel around the world, I want to hear people explaining, educating and inspiring me)

As you can see I built up high expectations, I hope they will be met. And if not there is always Vancouver, not the worst place in the world to spend a few days in anyway.

Is anyone else going? Or have you been?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m always happy when I hear that new music services go live (or, like in this case, re-launch). I am fully supportive of of companies trying something new and different and it’s great that there are people out there taking risks. My cynical side however was looking at all the blog posts carefully when I was reading about lala’s new business model. And not just because this must be the fourth time that they have come up with a new one.

So you can pay 10 cents to ‘buy’ access to a track an unlimited amount of time however if you own the track already on your computer (and you let lala scan your library) you can listen to that track for free an unlimited amount of times. You can also buy full track downloads for 90 cents. Sounds all pretty complicated and I agree with what Bob Lefsetz was posting yesterday:

[...] With x number of people new to Google this year, what are the odds consumers are going to understand Lala’s business model?  Shit, I can’t understand their business model.  I rent the music online, but only online, I can use my own stuff online…what about the rarities, do those get uploaded too?  And, is it so complicated that I ultimately want to use this service? [...]

TechCrunch has got a different opinion and I get their point of view:

[...] Conversely, Lala wants you to listen to as much music as possible in the hopes that you’ll keep clicking that addictive 10 cent “web song” button, and is forgoing advertising entirely. The result is very refreshing. [...]

What I find refreshing is that those new ideas are coming out of a company that is party owned with Warner Music. There was never any doubt that there are very smart people working at Warner and it looks like we can now see some of that. It was always obvious that the big content owners should have been much more pro-active when it comes to new ways of monetizing their content. They missed out on that for years and are suffering because of that.

I can’t test out lala myself (as it’s only available in the US) but it sounds like it’s not very user friendly but makes sense in the end. Lets hope people out there are going to have the patience to figure all that out. And if not they can always come up with a new model.

1. Herman Dune ‘Not On Top’
2. Of Montreal ‘Gallery Piece’
3. Under Byen ‘Samme Stof Som Stof’ (Make Me Fall In Love Remix By Polmo Polpo)
4. Love Is All ‘A More Uncertain Future’
5. Her Space Holiday ‘Sleepy Tigers’
6. The Decemberists ‘O New England’
7. Frightened Rabbit ‘Set You Free’ (N-Trance Cover)
8. Sufjan Stevens ‘Sister’
9. Manchester Orchestra ‘I Can Feel A Hot One’
10. The Mountain Goats ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’
11. Ivana XL ‘The King’
12. Nightmares On Wax ‘Nights Interlude’
13. Sol Seppy ‘Enter One’
14. Seasick Steve ‘St. Louis Slim’

You can listen to all this here.

Off sick today. Kind of depressing to sit at home all day but I was able to do two things:

1. Watch Ghostbusters (the first one). Love it.
2. Spend some time on YouTube. I found out that there was a video of that Frightened Rabbit remix of N-Trance’s ‘Set You Free’ that I was playing on my show and even more played on my iPod. Not quite new but well worth checking out:

I’ve been thinking/talking/blogging a lot about getting rid of all my CDs and records and how I feel I don’t need want to own any physical data carriers any more. It’s easier said than done but I’m on the right course.

Stefan Glerum seems to share my view and published some brilliant illustrations on his blog about vinyl records specifically and the obsession of finding (and owning) records: crate digging. Check them out yourself, this is special.

I had a few days now to recover from Popkomm (and more importantly the weekend that followed the conference). I’ve been asked a lot “so how was Popkomm?” and probably never gave the same answer twice. In summary this is probably what I was trying to say:

It was yet again less busy than the years before. If you’ve followed my tweets you would have seen that I kept complaining about it. After thinking about it a bit more the fact that there were less people attending probably wasn’t a bad thing: it is totally fine that those events become smaller and in a way they might even improve if they are more intimate. Nevertheless it was very unusual to be at the British stand (which was put on by AIM only this year and not the BPI any more) on Thursday afternoon at 4.30pm and seeing only 40 people standing there. At that time you would normally have about 300 people there drinking their (hopefully) well deserved beer.

As I posted here before many of my UK and US contacts didn’t even make it to Popkomm this year. One common explanation for that was: Midem is happening in three months so one might as well go there only and meet everyone. When you have to travel over from the States this makes a lot of sense.

It was only when I went to the Soundcloud launch party at Picknick last Friday night that someone pointed out to me that there were hardly any labels at Popkomm. I realized that I only had a few conversations about music at the conference – it was mainly about the business around it. Again, this is not a bad thing but it makes me feel less party of a creative industry. When I unpacked my bag on Sunday I had two CDs in my hand – when I first went to Popkomm in 2003 (this was still in Cologne) I came back with bags full of CDs and records. Were those the better days? I’m not into nostalgia so I’m going to say no: those times were just different.

There are some great gigs happening at the time of Popkomm but when you look at the events that are happening at the Kulturbrauerei you start thinking that some of those seem a bit ‘forced’. In regards to the line up of many of those gigs you can imagine that the promoters are sitting there thinking they have to fill all those venues because it is Popkomm time and therefore some gigs are a bit random. In addition to the official Popkomm events there are of course other great parties happening all over the city but I suppose that’s Berlin…

So how was Popkomm? I enjoyed it. The conference will have to find their place in the market as they are competing with other events more than ever but if they are clever they will be able to stay relevant in the future. They maybe weren’t this year.

1. The Decemberists ‘O New England’
2. Efterklang ‘Redrop’
3. TV On The Radio ‘Love Dog’
4. Frightened Rabbit ‘Set You Free’ (N-Trance Cover)
5. Gentle Touch ‘Pieter Van Den Hoogenband’
6. The Mountain Goats ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’
7. Deastro ‘Wind Powered’
8. Parken ‘At Helvete Med Himlen’
9. cassettes won’t listen ‘paper float’ (styrofoam x-911 remix)
10. The Teenagers ‘Homecoming’ (Gentelmen Drivers Rave Mix)
11. Holy Fuck ‘Balloons’ (Foals Cover)
12. Justice ‘Planisphere’ (Part 1)

You can listen to all this here.