Supreme Court Rejects Music Download Case

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal on a ruling that could have had serious revenue implications for all songwriters, with virtually 100's of millions of dollars at stake.

ASCAP had sued the United States government in the hopes of changing a traditional Internet download of sound recording to that of a public performance of the recorded musical work under federal copyright law. ASCAP had argued that digital downloads were also public performances for which the copyright owners must be compensated, but a federal judge and the appeals court rejected that argument, so the organization took it's final appeal to the highest court in the land.

"Music is neither recited, rendered, nor played when a recording (electronic or otherwise) is simply delivered to a potential listener," the appeals court ruled.

Being a songwriter myself, I'm all for getting more royalties at a higher royalty rate, but in all honesty, I just can't see how this argument holds water. A live performance and a recorded performance are simply not the same, as any engineer or producer will tell you. They're completely different animals. If the Supremes would have reversed the decision, it would have opened a huge can of worms with CDs, radio and streams eventually having to pay extra, potentially collapsing the whole music distribution system as we know it.

On second thought, maybe this was a missed opportunity to start all over again. What do you say Supremes; care to take another look?

The case is ASCAP v. United States, No. 10-1337, if anyone is interested.

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5 Features Missing From Facebook Music

Facebook Music has awaited with almost as much anticipation as Apple's iCloud (which we'll probably see this week). Now that it's finally here and we've got a chance to look at it, it appears there are a few things missing. Here's a piece of a great article from CNN.com regarding the 5 features missing from Facebook Music. For me, number 4 is the big one. You can read the entire article here.

"1. True music sharing
We're not saying it would be easy, but if Facebook really wants to help people listen to each other's music, it should let them do so using whatever music service they want. True, Facebook has started down the road of universally translating between music services, so that I can hear your songs even if you use Rhapsody and I use MOG -- but so far, it has done so by tilting the playing field favorably (some would say unfairly) towards Spotify.
If Facebook really wants to offer "frictionless" music sharing, to borrow Zuck's oft-repeated phrase, it will let people listen to shared stuff using whatever they want, rather than the same service used by the sharer.

2. Real-time group listening
A Facebook employee deleted a tweet about it, but Evolver.fm has confirmed that at least two streaming radio services plan to implement it. Slacker, specifically, says it has been working with Facebook to do so for months. So why didn't Facebook Music launch with the ability to join other listeners on a station in real-time, so that people can chat about what they're hearing a la Turntable.fm? This will probably be the neatest thing about Facebook Music, and even after yesterday's presentation, it's 100% vaporware.

3. Music tab in the ticker
Facebook is now more cluttered than ever, which, according to hilarious Wired.com pundit Lore Sjöberg, is because Facebook finds it beneficial to keep its users dissatisfied while offering them a forum where they can express that dissatisfaction -- just like the Democratic Party.
Zuckerberg kept using the word "lightweight" to describe the new Ticker on the right side of Facebook, but accusations of clutter are not without merit. So why not add a music filter? As a music fan, I'm mainly interested in what people are listening to, Ticker-wise. I don't care about who my friends have friended. The Facebook Ticker should offer a way to look only at music activity, and there's no good reason for it not to.

4. Apple
As Matt Rosoff of Business Insider observed, the white elephant not in the room at f8 yesterday was Apple, iTunes, and iCloud. Apple would need to swallow some pride in order to join Facebook's music ecosystem, but maybe it should.
Some argue that Apple only ever sold music in order to sell more iPods and iPhones anyway. Now that it can sell apps for other music services, and run those on its devices, perhaps Apple is no longer concerned about selling music. From a user perspective, it would be nice if iTunes activity were included in Facebook's music activities. Last.fm scrobbles from iTunes, so why can't Facebook? Maybe this one will happen when Apple takes the wraps off of iCloud later this year.

5. Independent developers
For this one, Facebook's off the hook for the most part -- it just needs to stay out of the way.
One of the neatest things about Rdio and now Spotify is that they let independent app developers build third-party players atop their catalogs. If I subscribe to either service, I can use any music app that taps into it, offering a potentially huge range of interfaces, platforms, designs, features, etc. to choose from -- more than Rdio or Spotify could ever develop on their own.
WIRED: Facebook's gone rogue -- it's time for an open alternative
If someone wants to build a music player that lets people choose what to play by rolling virtual dice, slaying a dragon, wandering through a 3-D library, or whatever, on any platform, I can use that interface to play Rdio's or Spotify's music.
This is already starting to happen -- and unless Facebook somehow gets in the way, all of the music played in these third-party apps should appear on Facebook. In fact, Facebook could even encourage this sort of thing."

 Let's see what happens at Apple's press conference tomorrow. iCloud, anyone?

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How Many Photos Have Ever Been Taken?

There are some questions that are unanswerable. What is love? How do you make a hit? How many people have inhabited out planet from the beginning of time? How much water is in the oceans of the world?

While we don't know exactly, we do have a fair idea regarding the number of pictures that have been taken in the history of photography. How is that? Well, considering that the art has only been around for about 200 years or so, it's a pretty recent development in human history, and fairly well documented. That said, with the proliferation of cameras in just about every camera, picture taking has grown exponentially, and I'll show you some graphs that will blow your mind in a minute.

First, here are some interesting stats to set the stage:

• From all the photos taken up until about 1960, it's estimated that 55% of the photos were of babies.

• The 20th century was the golden age of analog photography, peaking at an amazing 85 billion physical photos in 2000, which turns out to be an incredible 2,500 photos per second.

• It's estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital camera (out of 7 billion).

• If the average person snaps 150 photos this year, that would amount to a staggering 375 billion photos.

• People will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook, suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there.

• Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos. That's over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress!

• It's estimated that we humans have now taken over 3.5 trillion photos!

• Ten percent of all the photos we have were taken in the past 12 months!

The point here is that picture taking is so easy these days, you should never hesitate to take one. The number of times I wish I had a picture of something in the past is way too frequent, and it's usually something I could've used in a book to illustrate a point.

Below are a couple of graphics that will blow your mind. For more info as well as the references for the figures above, click here.

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What People Spend On Entertainment

Digital Music News had an article the other day on the average amount of money that people in the U.S. spend on entertainment. The following charts came from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and they're very revealing.

The first chart shows that the average person in the US spends almost as much on entertainment (5.2 percent) as on healthcare (6.6 percent) and quite a bit more than on clothing (3.5 percent).

The second chart shows that the average consumer spent less on entertainment in 2010 than any of the last 4 years (no surprise there). While the rest of the numbers seem kind of bogus to me, what stood out was how much people actually spent on musical instruments and instrument repair on average. It's a huge part of American entertainment.

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Hashtags And The Most Effect Promotional Tool

Here are a couple of different articles posted on some great blog sites that recently included a thing or two from yours truly.

First of all, the excellent Hypebot blog just posted an article called "Hypebot Readers Share Their Top Music Industry Hashtags." It's a good insight into the hashtags that work for a number of bloggers, including myself. Check it out here.

The second is an article by the first lady of musical social media, Ms. Ariel Hyatt, that was posted on another great blog - Music Think Tank. This one's called "Music Marketers FAQ – What's most important as a promotional tool: Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube?" In it, Ariel (from Arielpublicity.com), Rick Goetz (from musiccoaching.com), Corey Dennis (of TAG Strategic), Carey Lynn Hall, Cassie Petry (of crowdsurf.net) and moi give a brief overview of which of the social media tools we find most effective. You can access the post here.

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What People Will Pay For Online

Here's an interesting chart from research and consulting firm Magid Advisors, a unit of Frank N. Magid Associates, that outlines the attitudes of consumers toward paid content online and mobile.

The most recent studio in April shows the group most likely to buy paid mobile or online content is 25-to-34-year-olds, and the second most likely group is 18-to-24-year-old users, followed very closely by 35-to-44-year-olds.

What's interesting is that the Napster generation of Web 1.0 -- the one where all content is free -- has evolved to see paid content as a reasonable alternative to advertising-supported content or pirated content.

It seems that iTunes has led the way in teaching people to pay for and download digital content -- movies, games and TV shows, since all of these are big with the teenage and young adult populations.

The studio also found that many older people, particularly middle-age women, are also big buyers of movies, shows and games, like social games and Web games.

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Wow! Do We Text A Lot!

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recently did a study on texting and the results are shocking, at least to me.

Here are some very interesting texting stats:

• 83% of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages. 

• 31% said they preferred texts to talking on the phone, while 53% said they preferred a voice call to a text message. Another 14% said the contact method they prefer depends on the situation.

• 55% of those who exchange more than 50 messages a day say they would rather get a text than a voice call.

• Cell owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day—that works out to more than 3,200 texts per month!

• The typical or median cell owner in this age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (or 1500 messages per month).

• Text messaging users send or receive an average of 41.5 messages on a typical day, with the median user sending or receiving 10 texts daily – both figures are largely unchanged from what we reported in 2010. 

• Cell owners make or receive an average of 12 calls on their cells per day, which is unchanged from 2010.

There's a whole generation that doesn't text a lot, but the younger the person, the more they text. Clearly this method of communication is not going away, even if it is a windfall for the phone companies.

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Facebook's "Upgrade"

Today Facebook made some big changes. The most viewed social network is under some stiff competition and some user attrition to Google+, so they just had to do something soon before the trickle became a flood. Here's a bit of an article from Mashable that talks about the changes and has a great slideshow as well. We'll look at the specifics more next week.
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"For Facebook, it all boils down to one problem: emotion. Facebook has hundreds of millions of users and spectacular levels of engagement, but it is a platform that has lost its emotional resonance over the years. More and more people visit Facebook out of necessity rather than desire. It’s a platform people prefer to hate, but won’t leave simply because all their friends are there.

It’s a relationship gone stale. After years of dating, the magic between Facebook and its users has dissipated. It’s a natural evolution in any relationship, but now there is another suitor vying for Facebook’s users. And a lot of people think this suitor is easy on the eyes.

That’s why Facebook launched three recent changes: revamped Friend Lists, a real-time news ticker, and the subscribe button. Friend Lists lets you share content with just your closest friends (with whom you have the strongest emotional connection), and the ticker lets you have real-time conversations with your friends as soon as they do anything. Subscribe lets you fill your News Feed with people you admire and respect, fostering a different type of emotional connection.

But these changes are just the beginning. The changes Facebook will roll out on Thursday are designed to enhance the emotional connection its users have to each other through Facebook. These changes will make Facebook a place where nearly everything in your life is enhanced by your social graph. These changes will make it so you know your friends better than you ever thought you could."

I think the most significant update will be "subscribe," a feature that we'll look at in detail next week.

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8 Tips For YouTube Marketing

Here's an interesting post from Hypebot a while back regarding YouTube marketing. I've posted a lot about YouTube optimization, but there are a few tips here (3 and 7) that I hadn't touched on before. You can read the entire article here.

1. Post Compelling Videos on a Regular Basis. Give folks something worth looking at and a reason to return.

2. Optimize Titles and Descriptions for Findability. Important for searchers on both YouTube and search engines.

3. Create Custom Thumbnails for Your Videos. This is your first look but try to entice without misleading.

4. Use All Analytics/Metrics, Not Just Views. It doesn't matter how many views you have if they're only a few seconds long.

5. Interact With & Include Your Fans. Engage your fans in the comments and create ways to include them in your videos.

6. Collaborate With Other Artists. Working with others can extend your fanbase while leading to new ideas.

7. Create Playlists for Different Sets of Videos. Some folks will want to see behind-the-scenes, others just want finished product.

8. Brand and Optimize Your YouTube Channel. It's not just about individual songs or videos but about creating a following for your channel.

These tips were taken from the following sources, all of which have more to say as well as additional tips:
YouTube Music Marketing with David Choi
8 Ways to Maximize Your YouTube Marketing Results
YouTube Creator Playbook

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What's Trending @Twitter

Twitter is a big part of some people's lives, which is a story in itself, but the bigger story is how Twitter is used. Here are some interesting facts about Twitter use. Pay special attention to daily use rather than the celeb portion of the graphic.

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How Discovery Channel Uses Social Media

Here's part of a great article posted on Mashable regarding how the Discovery Channel uses social media. There are a couple of points here worth noting.

First, the 4 goals of the network in regards to their social media strategy. Everyone who uses social media for business (hopefully your music is a business) needs to have a reason, and Discovery is very clear on theirs, although they're not that different from most company's goals.

The second is the fact that the company divides their social media group into two teams: an “art” side and a “science” side. I truly believe that this is an important message for anyone who hires outside help in their social endeavors. You can't depend upon the "science" team to do it for you. You've got to drive the bus and create the content, then let your web and social people do what they.

Here's a portion of the article. To read the entire article, go here.
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"Though the network launched Facebook Pages in early 2009, it’s only in the last 12 to 18 months that efforts on social platforms have been “as focused and deliberate as they are now.” Discovery is the number one non-fiction media company in the world and has a large base of obsessed fans, so the network is constantly incorporating social media as part of the overall strategy. “It’s part of everything we do, from our .com pages to our marketing plans,” Weiswasser says. “Our philosophy on social media is to use it as a platform that enhances the viewing experience and the relationship with the viewers.” She goes on to outline the social media team’s four primary goals:

• Build relationships and engage with fans
• Personalize the brand
• Strengthen fan-talent relations
• Drive tune-in

In addition to running 24 hours of programming on several channels — the Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and more — the network produces a breadth of content for the web, including individual show pages, network pages, vertical pages and blogs. Discovery owns more than 70 Facebook Pages, with a footprint approaching 43 million fans — and getting 500,000 more each week — while its 120 Twitter accounts boast 2.4 million followers. As for that inevitable ROI question, Weiswasser says, “It’s hard to deny the value of such a huge group of fans, and its hard to deny the influence of all these people who have raised their hands and said, ‘I’m interested, I’m a fan.’” The fans’ enthusiasm on social has encouraged and fostered a very direct connection between the shows and the audience.

That enthusiasm is driven by an an exciting mix of content. Since Discovery produces TV content, it’s not surprising that video is expertly-produced and resonates very well with the fans. Other content includes blog post, sneak peeks, photos from the set, personal pics from a show’s talent and links that are related to a show’s premise (i.e. geology, cooking, etc.). You’ll notice that many of the links on Facebook and Twitter go to original content on Discovery.com — the network is good at integrating and promoting its content and not treating each platform as a distinct entity, but rather as one unit with many parts that build on and enhance the others.

But Discovery also excels at posting relevant content from all over the web, which keeps the conversation going. On the What Not To Wear Page, you’ll find links to articles about fall fashion trends, and you’ll find recipes on the DC Cupcakes Page.”We serve as a curator of topics for our fans,” says Weiswasser. “Content may not have anything to do with the show, but it is relevant to our viewers.”

The overall goal is to have the best content they can — they want people coming back because the content is interesting and engaging. Weiswasser says the Discovery team wants to make content as accessible as possible and doesn’t believe in like-gating. “We want the content to speak for itself,” she says. “If it’s compelling, people will want it — that’s how we got this footprint.”

The Discovery social media team is divided into two groups — an “art” side and a “science” side. The art side is part of corporate communications and handles content and tone, focusing on engagement and interaction with fans. Basically, they deal with the words and use the social web as a focus group from which they get real-time feedback. The science side is in the digital group, and that team focuses on analytics and metrics (fans, clicks, tweets, retweets, mentions, comments), optimizing pages to drive traffic to Discovery’s web properties. Crenshaw says his team is trying to do what all media companies are attempting — to determine the correlation between ratings and social. But sometimes it’s not just about metrics –”We can tell anecdotally if social is serving its purpose,” Crenshaw says. “We’ll post about a show, and someone will say, ‘Oh I didn’t know this was on tonight,’ or they’ll tweet asking what show to watch and we’ll tell them ‘MythBusters.’” The digital team also uses social media to identify and prevent crises, which can bubble up through Twitter and Facebook and be addressed and quelled before they become major blunders."

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Consumers Prefer Ownership To Streaming?

A new study by the Insight Research Group and commissioned by eMusic that took place in August 2011 came up with some very interesting results.

Despite the inroads of Spotify, Rhapsody, Grooveshark, the various cloud music services, and a whole host of other streaming services, the study contends that music consumers would much rather own their music than stream it.

Here's what they found:

-- 91% prefer to own music because it allows them to listen as many times as they want

-- 89% prefer to own the music they like, rather than stream it

-- 86% feel that ownership gives them security that their files will not disappear

-- 76% use streaming to discover music that is new to them, before they decide whether or not to buy

--74% will stream music for free, but wouldn't pay to stream

-- Only 13% pay to stream music online; 84% of consumers who pay to stream also purchase digital music files

-- 79% do not think they will ever give up owning music and just stream it online

-- 39% will store digital music files they own in a cloud-digital locker, so that they can listen to them anywhere

-- Only 14% will increase their use of paid streaming services

Now the first thing about this study is that it was commissioned by eMusic and they're a music retailer. It's in their best interest to have these kinds of results to keep their customers buying and the record labels and artists supplying to them. The second thing is that we're just on the event horizon of the streaming revolution. Come back and do the same study next year at this time and let's see the results then.

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