heute:pop:blog.  

I’m happy to announce my involvement with the start-up Gigulate, a music news aggregator based in London, UK. I will help them with Business Development out of North America.

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.

Those who listen to my show on a regular basis (and understand German) will see that Gerd Leonhard and myself share many ideas about the future of recorded music. He put together a brief overview on his thoughts in the YouTube video below.

It’s a great summary and there is a lot in those 10 mins – might be worth watching twice.

EDIT: as just pointed out by Chris, there is of course a second part to the above:

Helsinki reminded me of Hamburg. Maybe is was the lake in the centre or the lack of an Old Town (which was like in Hamburg destroyed in WW2). But most significantly I had a brilliant time in Helsinki, just like whenever I visit my home town.

I was there for an event organized by the YLE (“the Finnish BBC”) called “Embracing the music – music, Internet and public service” last Friday and it was well organized, informative and a lot of fun. Often these kinds of events are exactly the opposite.

As well as taking part in a big panel discussion I did a presentation (hopefully) giving an overview of the development of digital recorded music over the recent years and where it might be heading in the future. It had the catchy title “Development of digital recorded music and the way we consume it – the past, present and future”. I even had slides (which I never do).

My talk was built on the following assumption:

Music is like a rumour:

• It will spread around and one cannot control it
• It has a creator but no owner
• It has a ‘value’ but it can’t be set by the creator

“Control” is the key term here – we lost it when we started digitizing our recorded music and started to conntect our computers to a network. Control over recorded music is something we will never get back and any effort on this is wasted energy.

Join us for our OpenMusicMedia Meet in London next Wednesday (4th Feb 09). This time Songkick’s Ian Hogarth will be leading the conversation as always at the William IV near Old Street Station.

The theme set by Ian is ‘Live & Kicking’ and he’ll be talking about how the industry has boomed over past 9 years and where the concert industry is going to be in 5 years time. How start-ups and technology are going to accelerate that, and what you need to do to get on the train. With traditional recorded music sales in decline is the future of the music industry live? What can artists and bands do to monetize their live performances? Is it sustainable? What changes are we seeing in the live music sector? And what happens if the music doesn’t lend itself to the live arena?

Find more details on the OpenMusicMedia blog and hope to see you next week!

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.

If you are in London tonight feel free to pop into out OpenMusicMedia Meet at the William IV about 10 min from Old Street Station. We’ve got Anthony Volodkin from the Hype Machine telling us more about his great site followed by a broader discussion about blogs in a music context plus beer and food. 

Would be great to see you there, you can find all infos here.