Is The Web Dying?

The above chart from Wired Magazine shows a startling trend that backs up editor Chris Anderson's recent assertion that "the web is dying."

As you can see, the current Internet traffic is composed of primarily video, peer-to-peer, web, and slivers of email and FTP. According to the chart, all those had mostly peaked by 2000 and have declined ever since, with only video increasing in traffic.

It's an interesting chart but in reality has no bearing on everyday Internet use by just about everyone. We all use the web so much we don't even think about it, as we do with video and email. Email isn't as big a part of the traffic curve (it was never that big to begin with) because it's a short-burst interaction that now has many competitive alternatives, from social networking to texting. P2P is down because there are a lot more alternatives to easily buy a digital product legally. Newsgroups have fallen to blogs. FTP is down because so much info lives on the cloud already, and you can now email files as large as 10 meg or more.

Video viewing is up first because high-speed DSL is so widespread these days that none of the video quality and speed problems of 2000 happen today. The picture is better (HD quality now), and there's so much more of it available, thanks to YouTube and now, Vevo. 

But isn't it true that we access video via the web? Shouldn't that mean that web traffic should be up as a result? As always, statistics can be manipulated to show whatever you want, and this one certainly doesn't show the entire picture.

Will the trend in video usage continue? For now it will, but who knows what the next technology trend will be and how that will affect the use of Internet bandwidth. The thing about the Internet is, tomorrow comes quickly.

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The Truth Behind The Stones And The Windows 95 Ads

Microsoft certainly scored a coup when they got the Rolling Stones to agree to let them use their hit "Start me Up" for the huge ad campaign for Windows 95 15 years ago. Until then, the Stones (and most acts of that generation) had refused to license their music to commercials for reasons of artistic purity (when there was such a thing), so it was indeed a milestone when the song appeared across televisions worldwide.

Now an interesting post on businessinsider.com tells the story about how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards tried to switch versions of the song in order to eliminate paying former bass player Bill Wyman. It turns out that Mick didn't want to do the deal, but Keith was running short on cash (you never think of them in that situation), so a deal was struck. The Stones were also at a lull in their career and thought that the huge campaign that MS had designed would help reignite their career, which it did. Since Jagger is the CEO of the corporation and Richards is the COO, they make all the decisions without the others in the band voting.

When Microsoft received the final track they were horrified to find that it was a recent live version of the song instead of the original studio version. This was apparently done because the four Stones would make more money, since Wyman had already left the band and wouldn't be paid for a recording that he didn't appear on. MS pushed back and eventually got the original studio version and the rest is history.

Today artists don't think twice about licensing their songs to commercials. They can't afford to since it's one of the only remaining sources of income in these days of Music 3.0. In fact, artists are willing to do almost anything to get their music on television these days, and as a result, the advances are far, far less than what the Stones got back then (although a huge hit song would still fetch a pretty penny).

The story also goes to show that when it comes to money, never trust your friends or bandmates. Things can get pretty cut-throat out there.

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5 Indispensable Twitter Tools

There was a good article the other day in the Social Media Examiner regarding the 5 most indispensable Twitter tools. I don't know how indispensable they are, but it's a good idea to know about them.

Here they are:

1. Blast Follow - indispensable for finding people in your niche (and beyond) and mass-following them with a single click. Good for research.

2. Tweepi - allows you to unfollow those who do not reciprocate. If you use this, you're using Twitter wrong.

3. twAitter - allows you to schedule your tweets in advance. Good app if you're using Twitter to broadcast blog postings. Not so good if used mostly for personal tweets.

4. Tweetdeck - allows you to organize your followers and keep an eye on the really interesting ones in separate groups. It also allows you to post to Facebook and Linkedin at the same time, and to schedule your posts as well. I use this one all the time.

5. Tweetchat - allows you to isolate the conversation based on the hashtag. If you don't know what a hashtag is, take a look at this past blog post.

For more information on each of these tools, see the original article.

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New Social Media Analytical Tools

As social media becomes more sophisticated, so does the measurement tool requirements to determine both your impact and branding possibilities. Three new methods of analyzing social media data have shown a lot of promise, but it might be a bit too early in the learning curve to completely trust the data. Still, it's good to know about what's on the horizon.

Sentiment analysis is a process that tries to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to the topic they're writing about. If you actually read a blog or posting, you can tell the writer's sentiment immediately, but this analysis method tries to define and measure it as points of data.

Cluster analysis tries to analyze how certain words are gathering (or “clustering”) relative to a search topic. It finds the words that are mostly likely to be associated with your search word, which may provide unexpected insight into what’s being said about you and even predict sales before they happen.

Semantic analysis is another measurement tool that strives to understand what words mean in context to one another. Once again, it's something that we do for ourselves as we read, but this tool puts a number to it.

All of these tools are trying to measure what we can immediately see for ourselves empirically by just wading into the social media pool. They put a number to something that we can feel.

New measurement platforms like Sysomos and Radian6 are said to be using these tools to provide a more precise look at how you or your brand integrates with the social world.

If you need data for a meeting, to sway an investor, or appease a boss, these tools are important. If you're a marketer on a very high level, you might find the data immediately useful. If you're a band or artist just trying to make the next sale, the next gig, or make it through the next day of social media management, you'll find them interesting as best and parlor tricks at worst. But while these tools may be cutting edge today, you never know if they'll be an essential part of your marketing toolbox tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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10 Best Digital Music Startups

Since we looked at the 10 worst music industry disasters a few days ago, lets look at the 10 best Digital Music startups, according to Billboard Magazine.

1. The startup of the year is RDIO.com, a new site that offers $5 a month, all your can stream over the web or $10 a month on mobile.

2. VEVO.com is a new video portal owned by Universal Music, Sony and Abu Dhabi Media (a strange combination), and hosted by Youtube and Google.


3. SONGKICK.com allows you to organize and track your favorite bands and track concerts and dates. 

4. KICKSTARTER.com is  a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers, and just about anybody else.

5. MFLOW.com is a music discovery and recommendation platform.

6. ROOTMUSIC.com is another band page site, although it does have the ability to submit songs to radio stations around the world.

7.NEXT BIG SOUND.com is a music analytics site that allows users to track mentions of their favorite bands and musical artists across a variety of major music websites: music plays on Last.fm and MySpace, fans on Facebook, iLike, Last.fm, MySpace and Twitter, band page views on MySpace, and band page comments on MySpace.

8. GUVERA.com offers free MP3 music downloads and streaming while the artists still get paid by matching brands to artists and listeners.

9. HELLO MUSIC.com acts as both a filter and a traffic manager, placing good music with partners such as Yahoo! Music and Getty Images. 

10. MY WERX.com is a technology company that develops cloud computing software solutions to optimize copyright ownership identification.

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Slicing The Profit Pie

Here's an interesting pie chart that can be quite disturbing to a new artist or band (can't remember where I found it). It's not entirely accurate, but it's enough to give you the idea that working at McDonalds might be a better career choice than the music business.

Let's break it down:

• If you're signed to a label, most new acts will have a deal that will give them about 15% of the net sales revenue. Now this isn't as good as it sounds, since the label has a variety of ways to make it seem like they've never made a profit even though your record might've went Gold (500,000 sales), but for now we'll assume they're straight up about everything (which only happens in your dreams).

So your left with 15%, but that figure can be as much as 25% if you financed it and produced it yourself and just licensed it to the label. Whatever the amount you're left with, here's how it's split.

• In the case of this chart, the band had a deal before and still owes the previous label money. Maybe they can get out of this and maybe they can't. In this chart, it looks like it amounts to about 1 point (percent) of your 15. You're down to 14 points. (I don't know why the agent is on this chart since he only gets paid on gigs, not record sales.)

• The band didn't have any money, so it made a "spec" deal with a studio that really believed in them. Spec means speculation, which means that they agreed to pay the studio probably another 1 point if the album sold. You're down to 13 points.

• The normal producer deal is 3 points, although it may be as high as 4 if the project was on spec. You're now down to 9 points.

• The manager is making 20% of your gross, which means he takes another 3 points, and you're down to 6.

• You didn't have any money to pay an attorney, so he did a contingency deal with you, meaning that he makes 5% of the gross of any deal that he negotiates. 5% of 15% is another .75 of a point. If you also have a business manager that has the same deal, that's another .75 of a point. That means 1.5 points of your remaining 6 and you're down to 4.5.

• That means that if there are 5 people in the band, each one gets .9% of the income from the record.

Now if the album went gold with sales of 500,000 copies (which rarely happens these days) at a wholesale of $7.50 each (also high for the times), that means the label brought in a total of $3,750,000. Assuming that there was no hanky-panky with the accounting (in your dreams only), that means that each member of the band made $33,750. This doesn't include any tour expenses and the fact that you probably worked pretty hard for a couple of years before this check came in.

Still feel good about the music business?

Of course, if you were a songwriter, you made money on mechanical and performance royalties, and the band may have made some money on gigs and merch.

But you're not going to get rich even under the best of circumstances, and they hardly ever happen these days.

That's why the only reason to be in this business is because you love the music. You've got to do it because it's what you live for, and you're willing to make the sacrifice in lifestyle that it will take to pursue the dream. If you're worried about the money, go back to school and get your MBA.

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10 Most Disastrous Music Industry Deals

The every insightful and entertaining Digital Music News had a great article today on the 10 most disastrous music industry deals, that I thought was worth sharing.

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It's been a rough decade. Digital Music News dove into the archives for the ten most disastrous deals of the past ten years....

(1) Terra Firma's acquisition of EMI, $4.7 billion (2007)
Even Guy Hands (the embattled chairman of private equity investor Terra Firma) admits he made a colossal mistake on this one. One of the last super-leveraged buyouts before the bust, EMI has now become a $4.7 billion-plus toxic mess for Terra Firma.

(2) CBS' acquisition of Last.fm, $280 million (2007)
Scrobbling is cool and all - and this is still a very cool site - but few would "recommend" this deal today. Amidst predictable ad monetization challenges, the company has since switched to pay-only in certain European countries, outsourced full-length videos, and bid adieu to the original founders.

(3) Bertelsmann's investments in Napster, $100 million (2000-onward)
In retrospect, Bertelsmann was the forward-thinking maverick. But in the moment, that stance created a legal sinkhole for the company, accused of facilitating widespread infringement by keeping the P2P alive. The in-fighting lasted years before expensive settlements torpedoed Bertelsmann with hundreds of millions in losses.

(4) MP3.com acquisition by Vivendi, $372 million (2001)
Before MySpace was even conceptualized, MP3.com was setting huge records for IPO valuations, label lawsuits, and band profiles. Problems quickly followed the inflated purchase, and the site was quickly dumped by Vivendi Universal in 2003.

(5) The Robbie Williams 360-Degree Deal, $160 million (2002)
Williams loves being able to walk the streets of Los Angeles without being recognized. EMI, which structured the pricey deal, is somehow less thrilled by that freedom.

(6) The Sony BMG Joint Venture (2004)
The 50-50 JV (joint venture) was like "tying two sinking rocks together," according to one executive, and this seemed like a dead weight from the beginning. Bertelsmann walked away, and the combination was ultimately purchased by partner Sony Music Entertainment by 2008.

(7) WMG's Investment in Imeem (2009)
"We do not intend to make more digital venture capital investments," WMG chairman Edgar Bronfman told investors after suffering a $16 million write-off on Imeem in 2009. MySpace subsequently scooped the property for well under $1 million.

(8) WMG's Purchase of Bulldog Entertainment, $16 million (2007)
Bulldog Entertainment Group was best known for coordinating tony concerts in the Hamptons. The company eventually cratered with estimated losses of $30 million.

(9) Any Deal Involving PlaysforSure...
This was a mistake that caused endless suffering, for music service (Yahoo Music, MTV Urge, Wal-Mart), player (Sony, SanDisk, Samsung), and consumer alike. In fact, even Microsoft bailed on its DRM-heavy solution with the launch of Zune.

(10) Best Buy's Exclusive on Chinese Democracy...
Some comebacks are better than others, and Best Buy was left carrying a truckload of Guns N' Roses CDs. That did little to kill the big box exclusive, however, as plenty of big-name artists have used the concept to shift serious tonnage.

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Royalty Complexity - But The Attorneys Love It

Musicians and songwriters are often a bit baffled by the complexities of the music business, especially the various royalty streams that they may or may not be participating in.

Let's count a few - on a record label level we have physical sales, licensing, download, streaming and foreign royalties.

On the publishing side we have performance, licensing, mechanical, and streaming, not to mention royalties on physical merch and even image licensing. And there's more; a lot more. If you're getting income from all of these than you're probably doing very well.

But the music business is a complex world that gets more tangled with each passing year.

As an example,  the UK's Pure radios recently release a new service called FlowSongs, which allows anyone listening to to a song to click on a button to get all of the song's details and even buy the song. A great idea if there ever was one, but it seems that the technology surrounding the service was the easy part. Things really get dicey when it comes to sorting out the artist royalties.

At the FlowMusic launch, Pure’s CEO Hossein Yassaie shared a slide showing the complicated mess his company had to decipher when it came to paying out royalties to the various parties involved. He said the slide on the left took three hours to be explained to him, and it's been dumbed down!

“I didn’t believe it at first… being an intellectual property company we understand licensing,” Yassaie said. “But I have to say I have never seen anything as complicated at this.”

This is why music attorneys still remain a part of the music business that continues to thrive. The way things are going, they'll be forever employed.

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The History Of The Music Video

I have a book coming out next year called The Musician's Video Handbook that gives a musician all the tools he needs to create any number of videos that are now integral to an artist or band's career.

Here's an excerpt from chapter 1 that traces the history of the music video.
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Music with picture goes back a lot further than you might think. With the arrival of the synchronized film sound in 1926, many bands, vocalists and dancers of the era were viewed as excellent demonstration content for the new medium and featured in short musical films by the Vitaphone company. Then in 1932, in what was perhaps the first music video, blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called St. Louis Blues which featured a dramatized performance of the hit song. Moving into the 1940’s, musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs that also foreshadowed many of today’s performance-style music videos.

In the 60’s, music videos started to become more experimental. One of the premier prime-time television shows of the time was “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” that frequently featured the guitar playing and singing son of Ozzie and Harriet, Ricky Nelson. In a departure from the typical performance video where the artist played to the camera, patriarch Ozzie Nelson directed and edited the video of the Ricky’s hit song "Travelin' Man" and featured images of various parts of the world cut into the performance. This was certainly not even worth a second thought by today’s standards, but it was groundbreaking at the time. I can remember thinking how distracting those images were when I watched it back then, but the video was the precursor of things to come.

One of the earliest directed performance clips was the promo film made by The Animals for their breakthrough 1964 hit "House Of The Rising Sun", which was filmed in a studio on a specially-built set and featured an edited sequence of tracking shots, close-ups and long-shots, as singer Eric Burdon, guitarist Hilton Valentine and bassist Chas Chandler walked around the set in a series of choreographed moves. Heavy stuff for the time!

We’ll put the breakthrough feature films by The Beatles and others aside, since this book is focused on every kind of video a musician needs except making a feature film, but it should be noted that the Fab Four used video to their full advantage even back then. In 1965, The Beatles began making promotional clips (then known as "filmed inserts") for distribution and broadcast in other countries so they could promote their record releases without having to make in-person appearances. At the same time, The Byrds began using the same idea to promote their singles in the United Kingdom, starting with the 1965 single "Set You Free This Time". After seeing the success of this strategy, the floodgates opened and just about every popular group of the time including The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, The Who, Procol Harem, and even The Carpenters all did several videos of selected hits. In the late 60’s, Motown records was one of the first record labels to see the advantages of having video of their acts, with all of their artists making several clips available as needed for the various dance shows of the era like American Bandstand.

But music videos were changing. Instead of limiting themselves to strictly performance videos, many acts began to explore the abstract, led by the major acts at the time, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. The monochrome 1966 clip for Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" shows Dylan standing in a city back alley, silently shuffling a series of large cue cards bearing key words from the song's lyrics in time to the music while his underground celebrity friends Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth converse in the background (the cue-card device has since been imitated in numerous music videos). Then in 1967, the clips for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" took the promotional film format to a new level as they used techniques borrowed from avant-garde films such as reversed and slow motion, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and color filtering added in post-production. As with their music, the Fab Four felt the need to break from the traditional manner of production and tried to depict a narrative or plot instead of strictly performance.

By the end of the 70’s, everyone was getting into the act, as even cult groups like The Residents and Devo (who’s videos actually helped them break out to mass appeal) found it useful to produce their own videos. Bands like the Swedish group ABBA continued to use promotional videos of their songs with great success instead of touring (although they eventually did one brief tour of the States).

But music videos were about to be taken to another level as ex-Monkee guitarist Michael Nesmith began to consider video an integral part of the music and composed both music and the video at the same time. This conceptual leap became Elephant Parts, which was the first video album and first winner of a Grammy for music video. That being said, the biggest evolution in the marriage of video and music was about to come.

The atomic bomb of change in music video came with the arrival of MTV in 1981, but not many know that we have the evolution of technology to thank for its sudden surge in popularity. If it wasn’t for the fact that cable TV became widely available at that time, and the arrival of fairly affordable videotape recording and editing equipment (everything was shot on film to this point), the music video revolution wouldn’t have been nearly as rapid or bombastic. Suddenly there was an outlet that focused exclusively on the promotional video, and both MTV and their music fans couldn’t get enough of them. Almost overnight, MTV became a powerful force in the music industry, launching or propelling the careers of superstar acts like Madonna, Culture Club, Peter Gabriel, Dire Straits, Queen, and The Police, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the major record labels.

But perhaps the most dramatic event for both MTV and music video occurred in 1983, when the most successful and influential music video of all time was released, the nearly 14-minute-long video for Michael Jackson's song "Thriller." While the video set new standards for production (produced and directed by film maker John Landis at a reported cost of $500,000), Thriller, along with earlier videos by Jackson for his songs "Billie Jean" and "Beat It", was instrumental in getting music videos by African American artists played on MTV. Up until that time, the network’s content was centered squarely on rock. MJ made it not only acceptable for black music to be played on the network, but set the stage for the hip-hop revolution that it would help propel into the mainstream. 

Many critics of MTV and the music industry feel that music changed for the worse as the network’s viewership grew and the videos became ever more sophisticated. Because MTV had become so important in breaking an act, the major labels began to look for artists with a well-honed image and good looks that translated well to TV, while the emphasis on the music became less of a concern. Perhaps this kind of thinking eventually led to the fact that the subsequent “hit” artists became less unique and more homogenized as constant video viewing was no longer the attraction that it was when MTV debuted. In order to maintain or even increase its viewership, MTV slowly morphed into a lifestyle channel for the young, today rarely playing videos at all.

You’d think that with a major distribution outlet like MTV virtually out of the market videos would have a diminished importance, but today video music has become an essential element in the modern musician’s arsenal of tools. With the rise of the Internet, an artist has more video distribution avenues than ever before thanks to sites like YouTube (and about 250 sites like it), music and video blogs, various social networks, and the artist’s own website. If used properly, a video can even be far more important for outreach and connection to fans than any other artist to fan communication method ever used before. Where once upon a time an occasional video was reserved as promotion for a hit by a best-selling act, video is now an integral part of the game plan of any serious musician now that the costs of production are so low and there are so many avenues for distribution. 

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Metadata And The Album Release

I recently came across an excellent article on the musicianswages.com website called The DIY Musician's Pre-release Checklist by Cameron Mizell. There were a lot of great tips, but the ones I liked the best were about the ever important metadata.

Metadata is data about your data, which in this case amounts to all the information about your album. The article suggested that you create a document that has all the information about the album in one place so it's easy to access when it's later needed.

This data should include:

The Album Basics:

• Album title
• Artist name
• UPC or barcode

The Track Basics:

• Track titles
• Track timings
• Writer/composer and publishing credits
• Performer credits if they differ from track to track
• ISRC (International Standard Recording Code)

The Rest:

• Performer credits for the entire album (however you would list it in the liner notes)
• Additional liner note credits inluding recording, mixing, and mastering engineers, designer, photographer, etc.
• The legal line, or the information that shows up in small print on the back of your CD
• The rest of your liner notes, such as thank you’s, essays, or any other words
• Marketing blurbs, or short descriptions you plan on using online or in press packets

The more information that you upload with your music, the more likely it will be searched for, which can bring you potential new listeners. You may not be the object of the search (it could be your producer, engineer or art director), but you never know how you can benefit from a search for them that brings them to you.

Also, a lot of this information can be embedded into your MP3 files, and should be. Never leave a field blank if you can help it, because anyone curious about your music will want this information.

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When The Public Unexpectedly Likes A Song

As reported by the fine blog Hypebot.com, metal vocalist and film maker Rob Zombie spoke to AOL's Noisecreep, saying:

"Truthfully, when you make a new album ... you go, 'OK here's eleven new songs, five of which we'll never play live. And here's the two or three singles that will always be in the set. 

I think they [the record industry] dropped the ball a long time ago and they're never going to recover from it. Nobody wants to actually purchase music any more ... it's a weird time because the music scene is alive and well, it's just the music buying public is not. 

A year from now, I don't even know if they'll be pressing CDs anymore or, if they do, stores won't even bother carrying em."

Certainly what RZ says is true, but all throughout the history of music, songs that the composers and artists thought were just throwaways turned out to be some of their biggest hits. The fact of the matter is that you never know what the public will like. Big hits like Gloria Gaynors, "I Will Survive, " The Spinners "I'll Be Around," Rod Stewart's "Maggie Mae," and Oasis "Acquiesce," are just a few of the songs that caught everyone from the artist to the management to the record label by surprise, and there are hundreds more like that.

That's why returning to a singles-only marketplace can be dangerous for music, because some of the best songs are the ones we never expect to be popular.

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Ga Ga Numbers

With all the talk about DIY (do it yourself) for bands and artists, the only way that you can get really, really big numbers is with the infrastructure of a record label at your back. The LA Times printed the following numbers in an overview of Lady Ga Ga's impact on current music.

• 667,070,854: Combined hits from her videography on her official YouTube/Vevo channel for "Alejandro," "Telephone," "Bad Romance," "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich," "Poker Face," "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)," "Paparazzi," "Love Game" and "Just Dance."

• 3.64 million: The number of copies Lady Gaga's "The Fame" has sold in the U.S. since its release in August 2008, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (As of Aug. 1, 2010.)

• 1.3 million: The number of copies "The Fame" has sold in 2010 alone, making the 2-year-old album this year's fourth-bestselling album thus far. All sales numbers are courtesy of Nielsen SoundScan. (As of Aug. 1, 2010.)

• $24 million: Billboard's estimate of the gross for Lady Gaga’s 47 European and Pacific Rim tour dates.

• $440: The most expensive ticket package when Lady Gaga returns to Staples Center on March 28, 2011.

• $40: Cost of a Lady Gaga 2010 tour shirt.

• 179: Total number of shows Gaga will have played when the tour wraps next year (it began in 2009).

• 13: Number of Moonmen she could potentially walk away with at this year's Video Music Awards; she received the most nominations ever in a single year.

Now the only way any of this happens is with a major record label, at least at this point in time. And that's the one thing that they're very good at, capitalizing on a trend. The problem is, an artist like Ga Ga only comes around once a decade at most.

Will the major labels be capable of doing the same thing the next time around?

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