This year I have submitted not one but two panels since I will attend the Interactive as well as the Music part – one idea for each part of the conference.

I would appreciate if you could vote for my ideas in the SXSW PanelPicker, this is what I’m suggesting:

1. Digital Content: What Books Should Learn From CDs

I always found it fascinating that other content industries have difficulties learning from the mistakes of the music industry from the last ten years. This panel will invite people from the music and book publishing industries and discuss what they can learn from each other. You can vote here.

2. Entrepreneurs in Music

I will invite different music entrepreneurs and compare how they’re making it in their respective fields. Starting with a musician I will also get a start-up CEO, a indie record label boss and a band manager on the panel and talk about the joy and struggle of working independently in music. You can vote here.

Voting closes 27th August. Also, make sure you support my fellow OpenMusicMedia organizers, you can find a list of their suggested panels here.

Music streaming services are a great way for fans to access, consume and discover music on the Internet. They also offer bands and labels great ways to get discovered, build a fan-base, and, for some, there is even some money to be made. Unfortunately there are many misunderstandings about the different services on the Internet and this post will (hopefully) clear up some of the questions that Bandzoogle members, and other DIY musicians and indie labels might have.

So, what exactly are “streaming services”?

The “ownership” of music has become less relevant over the last years. Many people (myself included) don’t feel they need to own any CDs, vinyl records and mp3s if most music is available on the Internet to listen to. Ownership results in maintenance and responsibilities: we have to clean records and make sure they don’t get damaged. We have to back up our mp3 collection and make sure we keep the format up to date (who knows if mp3 as a format will still be relevant in five years ?).

A great alternative to the above is using a music streaming service to access music. The files are stored “in the cloud” and we only access them through the Internet as opposed to owning them. Typically, you will not pay every time you listen to a track but you will pay a subscription fee, or there will be advertising that you will be exposed to in order to listen to the music for free.

What is important to understand (and this is where it gets tricky) is that there are basically two types of services: “radio” and “on-demand” streaming.

The “radio” option is borrowing its name from a technology it has little to do with, but it refers to the fact that it’s more of a hands-off experience. A “radio” streaming service will play a music selection that you cannot directly decide. You might chose a genre or an artist you like and tracks will be streamed to you that are similar to what you have selected. It’s a music discovery experience to help finding new music based on what you already like. The only influence on what you will hear is that you might be able to skip or rate what you are listening to (helps the service personalize your playlist) but you will not be able to decide exactly what is playing next. Streaming services like Pandora and Last.fm fall under category “radio”.

“On-demand” streaming is a more active music listening experience where the listener can directly decide on what they want to listen to. It feels and often looks like an online jukebox where you can listen to specific tracks, whole albums or build playlists.  These kind of offerings can really replace a CD collection: if the service has all the music that you like there is no need to own the recordings any more. Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, and MOG are examples of an “on-demand” streaming service.

The reason why it’s very important to understand the difference between those two types of services is that the licensing and royalties structure work very differently in each one. Without going in too much details, a “radio” service would only pay a fraction of the royalties an “on-demand” service is paying, due to the different type of music consumption in each service. Also, a “radio” service might pay the royalties to a collection society (such as SoundExchange in the US) and an “on-demand” service might pay steaming royalties directly to the artist or label. All this also depends on the country the service is operating in. And that explains why some services are not available in countries where agreements are not in place. Confusing, I know.

As an artist, how can my music get on one of the streaming services?

Just like traditional record shops, most streaming services don’t deal with artists or smaller labels directly.  This is because very small teams run those companies and they do not have the resources to deal with thousands of artists every day. There are some companies out there that might be able to help you get on some of the streaming services; ReverbNation, CD Baby, Ditto Music and Tunecore are popular with DIY musicians, and companies like IODA, The Orchard and IRIS deal mainly with independent labels. Keep in mind that they might not be able to get you on all the different streaming services.

Is it really worth it that I add my music to those services?

There have been many discussions on the web about the amount of money that is paid out to artists by streaming services and those numbers seem to be low. But they aren’t. Every one of the big streaming services (certainly the ones mentioned above) are paying out millions of dollars every year to the music industry. There are a lot of misleading articles out there (such as this one) that make it look like the money paid out is very small. But, I like to make the comparison between traditional FM radio stations and streaming services: the digital services pay out much more to artists and labels per listener than the FM equivalents – and in the U.S. the FM stations are not paying anything to the artists (only to songwriters).

One thing I hear a lot is that music streams might cannibalize sales of music and therefore some artists are understandably hesitant to make their work available for streaming. I have not yet seen any hard evidence that anyone sells less music because fans were able to stream their music. In fact, music streaming is a great way to promote some of the products that cannot be digitally delivered through the Internet such as tickets to gigs, merchandise or limited edition premium CDs/LPs.

So should your music be available for streaming? I think every artist should make sure their music is available on the new services. Other than the fact that there is ultimately some money to be made, there is a much more important argument: your music has to be where the fans are so the “old” music industry don’t even have the choice to fight this development and progress. The days where artists and labels can control the music and decide where fans will find and consume it are over. This might not always be advantageous for the musicians, from an artistic or financial point-of-view, but fighting this development is not only hugely frustrating but also a waste of time. Every musician is an entrepreneur, and part of that means you have to understand your market and be reactive to changes quickly.

Looking forward to feedback and questions: feel free to leave comments here or contact me on Twitter or my blog.

One area that is highly interesting from my point of view are ‘music delivery services’. That’s what I call sites and services that can deliver recorded music to me, may as be as a permanent download or as a stream. Also, looking from it from an North American angle, I wanted to see what is happening on this side of the world. As I posted before, unfortunately most of the excitement in terms of digital music is not happening in Canada so my Ace VPN account came in very handy when I needed to pretend to the in the US to access the American services.

Even though there are a lot of new on-demand streaming services starting right now it seems like almost none of them are actually doing anything differently: many of them are web-based and offer mobile apps, cost $10 per months with a three day free trial, and you can stream as many tracks as you want on-demand. I understand that most of those features and mechanisms are actually dictated by the record labels which is a sad development: having ‘suppliers’ decide on business models will never encourage innovation and creativity which is what the industry needs more than anything.

If exciting, disrupting, user-friendly and useful are the criteria then I really want to mention three ‘music delivery services’ in this post:

1. Playdar

I’m not going to pretent that I fully understand what Playdar could do but I love what I can see so far. They call it a ‘Music Content Resolver’ which means that Playdar is a technology that can find music for you, may it be on your computer, your local network or on other music services.

The key is that Playdar is an open-source technology and anyone can either use Playdar to find and stream music within their application or build plug-ins so Playdar can find music in new places. Playdar is neither useful or user-friendly at this point but Richard Jones (Last.fm co-founder and one of the guys who started Playdar) told me that there should be a desktop application soon.

2. ExtensionFM

I love mp3 blogs and there are a quite a few I’d like to check on a regular basis. Call me lazy but I just can’t check 20+ sites every week to see if there is anything new on there that I might like. Also, I will have to download it all and add it to my iTunes. Oh, and of course having to listen to it as well.

ExtensionFM is a great solution for this. It’s a Chrome plug-in that automatically adds mp3s that are available from websites you select to your ExtensionFM library. It then checks on a regular basis if there are new mp3s available from these sites and you can listen to then straight in your browser. Just like the HypeMachine it does not allow you to download the tracks but you can go to the actual mp3 blogs later and download the mp3 from there.

ExtensionFM does something similar to Peel which I have written about on here before. What I like about ExtensionFM is that it’s all happening in the ‘cloud’ and there is no need for me to download anything. I’m desperately trying to move away from having any files on my computer and this is another step toward my cloud based entertainment world.

ExtensionFM is certainly a disrupting concept; record labels as well as mp3 blogs will potentially not agree with the way ExtensionFM finds content and streams it.

3. Spotify

I will not write a blog post about Spotify, there are enough out there. We can’t really call Spotify exciting any more but it’s the most useful and user-friendly music services out there;  I now use it almost exclusively for my music consumption needs. A UK credit card and £10 per month make it possible. If you have access to those two things then you should subscribe to Spotify right now.

The full music experience is more than about recordings. Although the actual ‘audio’ part is often the focus point, music as an art-form is much more complex: only by adding up things like the social experience of music, the relationship with the artist, visuals around the music and live gigs you can make music complete. One of the other aspects that are important is news about artists you like. Being a fan is about enjoying the music as much as observing the musicians and following the journey that leads to the audio output and live performances.

With the amount of user-generated and professional journalistic work on the web there currently isn’t shortage of news. Unfortunately this increased choice of stories leads to an exponentially increased difficulty to find the items you’re after and services that manage the information on the web have not only been hugely successful but vital for our daily online life.

Many music fans will have a few trusted sources for their music related news but I always felt that finding stories about my favourite artists was a lot of work, especially with my diverse music taste. There are too many sites to check if I want to be up-to-date on what’s happening around the musicians I follow and tools like RSS and Twitter only increased the amount of information I would have to go through.

Gigulate solves this problem for me. Not only will Gigulate check thousands of sources for music related news but it personalises this for me based on my Last.fm profile or artists in my iTunes library. This feature might be in its infancy right now but has already been proven very useful for me.

I’m also very impressed with Gigulate’s ability to recognize that a piece of news is related to a certain artist and to work out that two separate news-pieces are about the same story by just analyzing the content.

Without a doubt, Gigulate still has a long way to go and I’m excited to be part of it. I will mainly be working on developing partnerships, both commercial and strategical, which help music fans as well as the music industry to navigate through the large amounts of music news on the internet.

Just like there is no lack of music fans in Canada there is no shortage of talented programmers and entrepreneurs – other digital businesses (e.g. games, advertising, movies) seem to be quite healthy. Companies like Pandora, Spotify, MOG and Rhapsody however have never launched their service in Canada and others like Last.fm only have a limited service in the second largest country in the world. Also, looking at the new players that have seen some hype recently (such as mFlow, Thumbplay and rdio) have not announced any plans for a Canadian launch.

After speaking to a range of people about the lack of access to legal digital music in Canada there seem to be different explanations:

1. Licensing difficulties (1) – it is complex and expensive to license content from record labels for Canada

I find that hard to believe. When licensing reordings from labels or aggregators you will often strike multi-territory deals so there is not a lot of additional work needed when including Canada as a territory as part of a launch (for example) in the US. However, depending on the label, you might not be able to license content for all of North America under one deal but you have to go through two offices. There might be one department dealing with the US and one with the Rest of World.

Nevertheless, when launching an international music service it shouldn’t be too hard to include Canada as a territory from a label licensing point of view.

2. Licensing difficulties (2) – getting publishing rights is a nightmare

Yes it is. But it is everywhere. At least in Canada there is only one collection society dealing with the rights of the music composers whereby in the US you have to go to a bunch. In Europe you will (normally) still have to deal with a different organization in each country which is slowly changing so pan-European licensing should be easily possible at some point.

3. Canadian copyright law is in limbo

Whereby this is true it shouldn’t stop anyone from launching a music service in Canada. Without wanting to go in too much detail this is the deal: many people say that the Canadian copyright  law is outdated and needs modernisation. This was suppose to happen for years but whenever there is a new government the proposed changes are being put ‘on hold’ (read: ‘thrown away’).

The international music community is actually quite upset about the lack of movement in Canadian copyright law calling it a “major source of the world’s [music] piracy problem” (IFPI). Ouch.

Again, this should not stop anyone to launch a digital music company in Canada since the changes in copyright law are unlikely to affect consumer facing music delivery services.

4. Canada is too small to make an investment like starting a music service worth-while

This is probably the excuse I hear most often: It seems that companies feel their investment will not be returned because the music market in Canada is too small. And starting a music service is a rather big investment with the largest cost being music licensing.

I think this is a fair argument but doesn’t explain why services are being launched in the smaller countries in Europe (just one example here). So starting up a service in an English speaking country that has a similar music taste to its big neighbour shouldn’t be so hard then, right? After all, Canada is the seventh biggest music market in the world (2005).

‘Big neighbour’ are two very important words here. It’s a psychological issue that the US (population: 309m) is so big and suddenly makes Canada (population 34m)seem so small. Living here now for a few months I can see that Canada has a complex about being the ‘small neighbour’ and everything has to be compared with the US. And of course everyone has to agree that when it comes to starting any business, given the choice, one would have to go to the US as the market is simply larger.

But this is not what it’s about: Canada needs digital music companies that have already proven success in other big territories to launch locally or alternatively a new breed of Canadian companies that can move music fans away from unlicensed music usage.

Photo: EliB

The recording industry has always been more obsessive about metrics than other entertainment areas: music charts have been a vital tool not only to measure success of songs and albums but also to act as a marketing tool for record sales.

Over the last few years we see a lot of new services that focus their business on collecting and aggregating more accurate and detailed music data. The internet has enabled those services to get access to richer data sets than the pre-web sales driven charts such as popularity and discussion around artists.

In the second OpenMusicMedia NYC we want to discuss how those companies can (or maybe cannot) help the music industry to make better decision. Questions we want to address include:

• How important is more detailed data for the music industry?
• Does an obsession with numbers and statistics stop companies from taking risks and therefore stop innovation?
• Collecting data from different websites and displaying those seems straight forward – but what about interpreting them?

We have invited Alex White from Next Big Sound to lead the conversation and guide us through some of the issues of music related data aggregation. As always, this will not be a presentation but an open conversation between everyone in the room with Alex leading what could almost be called a round table discussion.

Moderating for the event will be Jonas Woost, co-founder of OpenMusicMedia as well as the former Head of Music at Last.fm. Jonas joins us from from his new home in Vancouver, where he is setting up a media consultancy business. Our co-moderator is Steve Savoca, global head of digital business for Domino Records and producer of OpenMusicMedia NYC.

We will meet on the 7th July at reRun and the event is free and open to everyone. However we would appreciate if you could RSVP on our facebook page. We look forward to seeing you there!

OpenMusicMedia NYC
Wednesday, July 7
at reRun (part of reBar, 147 Front St, 2nd Fl in DUMBO, 11201, New York, NY)
7-9 PM
Map: http://bit.ly/9VqMoh

Please RSVP on our facebook group.

I noticed that Karim from Techvibes was kind enough to record my short introduction for the OpenMusicMedia event in Toronto two weeks ago and this is the video. (By the way, the bricks you can see in the background are part of the oldest wall in Toronto.)

The event is organized by Generator and Evolution 2010 and I will be joined on stage by Ben Perreau (Global Radio/Gigulate) and Paul Campell (Amazing Radio) on the 24th May.

When I was on the phone today with our moderator Russ Conway I was reminded again of the gap in our terminology: we keep using the word ‘radio’ when we speak of services such as Last.fm and Pandora. The truth is that they have very little to do with the original ‘one-to-many’ broadcasting service called radio but we don’t seem to have a better term. ‘Personalized Streaming Music Service’ just doen’t sound very neat.

And something became clear today: I’ll probably have to get used to the fact that people will call me a ‘former Last.fm-er’. I noticed that’s the case with many of the guys that left Last.fm and I now often catch myself introducing myself as the former Head of Music. It just makes it easier for other people to understand what I’m all about even though we are more than the name of our old employer.

After years of proclaiming the ‘death of the physical format’ we’re still celebrating the traditional independent record shops. While big chains are disappearing or changing their inventory from music to other entertainment products the local record store still seems to have an important role in music discovery and delivery.

In our next OpenMusicMedia session on the 26th May we will be joined by Stephen Godfroy who is the Director of Rough Trade Retail to discuss some of the following issues:

• What is the current and future role of independent record shops?
• What is the state of the physical record business?
• With digital music becoming ubiquitous, what does that mean for physical formats?
• What role do record shops provide for a local music scene?
• Will record shops continue to act as a ‘filter’ for music recommendation or are they mainly a point of distribution?

We will meet again in the William IV in East London, a short walk from Old Street station. Sticking to the OpenMusicMedia formula this will be an open conversation and we’re looking forward to everyone’s contribution. All OpenMusicMedia events are free but we appreciate you RSVPing on our facebook event. To get in touch please leave a comment below or send us a message on Twitter. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Wednesday, 26th May 2010 6:00 PM

at the William IV

7 Shepherdess Walk
London, N1 7QE
(Google Maps)