Emily White, David Lowery, And The New Music Paradigm

If you've not been paying attention, there's been a minor furor recently between NPR intern Emily White and Cracker/Camper Von Beethoven frontman David Lowery. To briefly paraphrase the situation, 21 year old White wrote that she has 11,000 songs in her iTunes library yet has only paid for 15 CDs in her life, while Lowery wrote a long reply describing the Music 3.0 world of an artist and songwriter that wanted/needed to be paid.

It should be pointed out that White was lamenting the fact that she wanted to support artists she loved and felt guilty not paying for their music, but the culture of she and her peers dictates that music should be for free, and they rarely feel compelled to pay for it. After all, you can find it for free in so many places already anyway (YouTube, Grooveshark, the various Torrents, to name of few). She's not opposed to a service like Spotify and would love it if she could get anything she wanted, whenever she wanted, with a great portion of the money paid for the service going back to the artist.

Lowery went on and on and on about the problems of the music world today and, in my opinion, more or less missed the point.

This makes me want to arbitrate the conversation from a distance and illustrate where the music business is at today in regards to both consumers and artists/songwriters.

We live in a different musical world today. It's too easy for the consumer to get music for nothing or almost next to nothing. It's a commodity like soybeans, only less vital to our health and the economy. As White stated in her letter, kids don't care about liner notes or fancy packaging or even any packaging at all. They don't see the collectible nature of a vinyl record, cassette, or CD like the previous generations. It's a new ballgame.

That doesn't mean that they love music any less than the previous generations did, nor does it mean that music is any better or worse. Take a look beyond the top 40 (which has always been, for the most part, superficial) and you'll find some amazing acts.

The problem for many old school artists, publishers, and label executives is they can't accept that the paradigm has shifted. All of them want to be paid just like they were before. Who can blame them? It leads to a pretty cool lifestyle when the money flows freely. But those days are over, at least for now, and as far as anyone can tell, they're not coming back any time soon.

Artists and songwriters the world over want to get paid for their work, especially when they gain some measure of visibility. There's no argument that that shouldn't happen (I suffer just as much from a stifled royalty stream as anyone else), but the music creation system as it's constructed today doesn't match the way consumers consume the music they love.

There's no use complaining about it any more. That only pisses people off and it's not helping the situation. Buggy whip makers complained when the automobile hit the scene, as did typewriter manufacturers when computers were taking off. That didn't get them very far as they died a slow death. Adapt or die was never a more appropriate phrase.

I have some interesting thoughts on the things that have and have not changed in our journey from Music 1.0 to Music 3.0 which I'll share in a future post.

Read the Emily White post here, and the David Lowery reply here.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Songwriters Finally To Be Paid On Videos

Ever wonder how much a songwriter makes from a video that has 100+ million views on Vevo? You'd think it's would be a small fortune, but the answer is actually zero. That may be changing as of yesterday as Universal Music Group signed a deal with the National Music Publishers Group to finally pay royalties to both songwriters and publishers going forward.

Vevo is owned by Universal, Sony Music and Abu Dhabi Media and takes in about $150 million a year in ad revenue, none of which was passed along to songwriters or publishers. With the new agreement, Universal agrees to not only some retroactive compensation, but also to provide a royalty for other UMG offerings like ringtones, dual discs, multi-session audio and locked content products.

There are two things interesting here. First, only UMG is parcel to the agreement. Sony has not signed on. And the agreement specifies that UMG admits no wrongdoing, which stifles and lawsuits on this going forward.

That's one small step for songwriters. Let's see if another happens soon.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

22 Excellent Twitter Tips

Cheryl Lawson has some interesting Twitter tips that deserve mentioning:

1. Set up a photo and bio. Your bio should include who you are, and or what you tweet about.

2. Logos are OK but people like to connect with other people. Try using a photo of you.

3. If SEO is important, name your profile photo.

4. Include your website/blog link in your profile.

5. Make connections. Twitter is about conversations with interesting people. make sure you @ people.

6. Retweet (RT) if you enjoy a tweet. Share it with your followers. Retweeting = showing love.

7. Engage with people outside your normal friends circle.

8. Use link shorteners like Bit.ly to make more room to tweet and share links.

9. Use a Twitter client like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to see things in one place and see analytics.

10. Don't worry about the number of followers. If you tweet good content, they will come.

11. Find your favorite brands/bands/artists/companies on Twitter and follow them. Tweet them your feedback.

12. Find people talking about your band, music or brand and follow them.

13. If someone mentions your brand/company/you, be sure to respond.

14. Set up Google Alerts for topics of interest to tweet.

15. Subscribe to @Discus or similar to share blog comments with your followers.

16. Tweet live from events. Tweeting from events keeps your followers and positions you as an expert.

17. Balance tweets, replies and retweets. Too much of a good thing is too much.

18. Promote others more.

19. Tweet photos. A picture is worth a thousand words.

20. Find ways to meet your tweeps face to face.

21. Ask for help from your tweeps.

22. Dont feed the trolls. Not just on Twitter. You'll find people who want to pick a fight. Don't get in the ring.

These are all excellent suggestions. Use them wisely.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Kickstarter: Behind The Numbers

Kickstarter is one of the better known and more long-lived crowdfunding sites, and if you look inside the numbers that they publicly acknowledge, there's a wealth of information. As with most things in life, information is power. Let's take a look:

• Kickstarter has ad almost 46,000 projects from its inception, which have raised nearly $215 million thanks to almost 3 million backers.

• A full 50% of those projects have been successful, raising the amount amount of money established as a goal. 41% of projects have failed, .1% were suspended, and .1% were cancelled. The rest (8.5%) are currently ongoing.

• It's surprising the types of projects that are most successful:

Dance - 75%,  Theater - 71%,  Music - 68%,  Art - 57%,  Comics - 54%,  Film and Video - 51%,  Food - 51%,  Photography - 47%,  Design - 47%,  Games - 43%,  Publishing - 40%,  Technology - 39%,  Fashion - 33%

• But the most successful categories don't necessarily raise the most money (in millions):

Film & Video - $55,  Music - $33,  Design - $40,  Games - $23,  Art - $9.4,  Publishing - $9.3,  Technology - $9.0,  Theater - $6.8,  Food - $6.1,  Comics - $4.8,  Photography - $3.2,  Fashion - $2.3,  Dance - $1.8

• The average duration of a successful campaign is 38 days, but it's 43 days for the average failed project.

• Lower is better when it comes to monetary goals, as the average successful project raised $5,487 while the average failed project's goal was $16,365.

• Finally, 8.5% of funded projects received more than double their goal.

As you can see, crowdfunding is competitive, but if you have the right product, the right sales goal, and right sales pitch, the odds are good about even that you'll succeed. That's a lot better than most chances you'll ever take in the music business.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

A Tip To Improve Your YouTube Search Ranking

Here's a quick and easy tip to improve your YouTube video and channel search ranking from Tim Schmoyer's Creator's Tips over on the ReelSEO blog.

The way that most of us point people, artists, bands and brand to their YouTube channels is by providing a simple URL that looks like this:

http://youtube.com/yournamehere

In my case, my YouTube channel is called polymedia (it's a long story why I don't use bobbyowsinski) so my URL looks like this:

http://youtube.com/polymedia

The problem with this is that both YouTube and Google searches actually looks at it like this:

"http://youtube.com/user/yournamehere", or my my case, "http://youtube.com/user/polymedia"

It seems like such a small thing, but if you add the "user" into the URL yourself, Google ranks your channel higher than if you don't use it. Thus for me:

"http://youtube.com/user/polymedia" will rank higher than "http://youtube.com/polymedia"

Reports are that people who have added the "user" to their URL's have jumped in rankings from in the 20's to the top 3. It doesn't look as nice, but if Google likes it better and will rank you higher, that's the way to go.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

4 Common Facebook Marketing Mistakes

It's true that Facebook has a huge upside potential for marketing, but there can also be a downside as well if it's not done properly. Mashable recently posted a great article about the 10 biggest Facebook marketing mistakes, and here are the ones that I thought were most pertinent to musicians, artists and bands, since they could have serious consequences on your marketing effort.

1. Using An Illegal Cover Photo. The first thing is to use a picture that's pertinent to who you are right now. Don't use a baby picture, a picture of Darth Vader or a famous celebrity. Visitors may think you're trying to cover something up. Also, Facebook has a number of guidelines as for your cover photo as well, like:

• no price or purchase information in the photo (like "50% off")

• a call to action to like, comment or share with your friends

• contact info like web, email or mailing address (there are better places to put this rather than in the cover photo).

2. Breaking Contest Guidelines. Facebook is very sensitive to contests and wants you to closely abide by their rules. Here's what you should know:

• Contests asking for submissions or votes via comments or liking are prohibited.

• All contests or giveaways must be administered within Apps On Facebook.com

• You can't notify contest winners through Facebook on wall posts, messages, chat or the like.

Kind of puts a damper on things, right? Fear not, there are a number of 3rd party providers that can help you run a Facebook promotion, like Wildfire and Offerpop, but they'll cost you. Before you decide on any contest, read the Facebook promotion guidelines first.

3. Overposting. Yes, it's true, you can post too much. Facebook suggests that one or two posts a day get the most response, and there's some evidence that posting any more (sometimes even twice a day) begins to become counterproductive.

4. Too Much Text. Once again, it's possible to be too chatty, and that can produce negative results. Facebook suggests that somewhere between 100 and 250 characters (which equals a line or two of text) gets 60% more likes, comments and shares. Researcher Buddy Media has found that posts of 80 characters or less have 27% higher engagement rates.

You can read the rest of the mistakes in the Mashable article, but start by following these easy ones, since they can make a big difference in the outcome of your Facebook promotion.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Top 10 Twitter Music Law Resouces

CD Baby's DIY Musician blog is currently running a series called "The Top 100 Must-Follow Music Resources On Twitter" that I find is pretty interesting. One of the best parts to the series is their Top 10 Music Law people to follow. I personally haven't followed any of them, but I'm going to now. Here they are:

1. Christiane Kinney @musicalredhead 

Kinney writes/blogs about legal issues pertaining specifically to
DIY/indie musicians. She’s one herself, so her in-the-thick-of-it
perspectives carry a lot of weight.

2. Larry Zerner @Zernerlaw

Zerner is a lawyer in Los Angeles whose main emphasis is copyright,
trademark and entertainment law. He often blogs about music-related cases
and discusses them in his feed.

3. Cassandra Spangler @cspanmusiclaw

Spangler is a NY-based entertainment lawyer specializing in music, and is
also an independent musician herself. As she says, “I understand firsthand
the challenges facing independent artists and companies attempting to
navigate the often-present power imbalance of the music industry.”

4. Michael Scott @CopyrightLaw

This Twitter feed isn’t entirely about music, but many of the issues
discussed here can be applicable to any creative works. Great links to
current copyright news, as well as discussions on topics you might never
even have thought of.

5. Gordon Firemark @gfiremark

Firemark’s focus is on theatre, film, and TV, but he also covers music.
Plus, he provides many real-time links to stories that affect anyone in
the entertainment industry.

6. Peter Kaufman @dealfatigue

Kaufman is an entertainment lawyer who covers the ever-shifting
“deal-making culture.” He provides links to stories that are in that vein,
many about music.

7. Todd Murphy @The_Jazz_Lawyer

Murphy is a music lawyer, a producer, a musician, and a guy who just
generally knows about the business. Great insight on issues relating to
the ways in which musicians get paid.

8. Mita Carriman @nymusiclawyer

Carriman stays on top of all the legal entertainment trends, and does a
great job of sharing links to lots of articles about the rights of
musicians.

9. Tamera Bennett @TameraBennett

Bennett is a lawyer who handles copyright law and music publishing. Lots
of great links to stories about music, as well as general trademark and
copyright stuff.

10. Steve Gordon @SteveGordonLaw

Gordon is an entertainment lawyer, author of the book ‘The Future of the
Music Business,’ and the host of the podcast of the same name.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Top 10 Advantages Of Social Over Traditional Media

Here's a great post from a few years ago on the advantages of social over traditional media from Hubspot via marketing guru Simon Mainwaring.

Social media is the hub around which the Music 3.0 wheel turns, and the following provides some reason why.

As traditional and social media duke it out for the leadership role in commanding consumer attention, it’s worthwhile to highlight some of the undeniable benefits of social media. Here are ten that quickly come to mind. My comments in italics.

1. Cost: There are almost no barriers to entry in creating or distributing social media content. Or put another way, beyond your time and production costs, it’s almost free. (Still need the other nine reasons? OK.) And that single piece of content ricochets around the web indefinitely with no additional expense unlike TV, print or radio. The cost of time can be significant though, so that must always be kept in mind.

2. lntimacy: Traditional media necessitates broadcasting to thousands or millions of people at once robbing it of the specificity and dialogue that can be achieved through social media. Fans of any type want a personal interaction with the artist or brand, especially since they see it's now possible - another M30 fundamental.

3. Targeting: A key advantage of social media is that it can be far more specific in terms of isolating exactly who that brand or product wants to talk to. What’s more, consumers share the load by constantly sourcing information and products of interest and distributing them to others. Why broadcast to those who have no reason to care about you? Such a waste of time and money.

4. Nimbleness: One of the unique advantages of social media is that it allows brands to adapt to consumers buying and sharing habits almost instantly. Traditional media necessitates sizable (and often prohibitive) investments by corporations who then can’t react as quickly as market requires. While big media buys will probably never go away, they're far less necessary than ever before thanks to social media.

5. Measurement: Traditional media has to rely on long-term measurement tools to gauge the effectiveness of brand messaging. With social media that measurement can be almost instantaneous as the customers respond to brands and each other across networks, platforms and apps. When that response is negative, a brand has the chance to course-correct quickly minimizing damage to the brand. As the old advertising saying goes, "50% of advertising works, we just don't know which 50%." The age of that is now over.

6. Newness! Consumer preoccupation with whatever is new is hardly unique to social media. Yet as a function of its ability to constantly evolve in response to consumer demands, social media retains the sheen of “new” re-engaging consumer attention. With traditional media content can change but the format of distribution changes little and slowly. In marketing, "new" is more about what's current. It's far, far easier to be current ("new") using social media.

7. Exponential: As difficult as it is for a brand or product to thread the viral needle, the potential for exponential growth is almost unlimited and repeatable at a low cost. The problem here is that you never know exactly what will become viral. Still, at least the prospect of exponential viral growth is always available, while it's possible but pretty unwieldy with traditional media.

8. Participatory: As soon as the barriers to content creation approached zero, consumers quickly stepped into the vacuum and began participating in the commercial dialogue. It’s as if the longstanding presumption of traditional advertising that brands and consumers were in dialogue has finally come true thanks to real-time communication tools. Once again, true fans, super-fans, "tribe" members crave interaction, especially since they now know it's possible.

9. Proximity: Time and distance have virtually disappeared as a barrier between consumers around the globe. As such, social media has created a global, connected community like never before. That opens up enormous potential for success or failure depending on how well brands understand the new dynamics in play. We are truly in a global economy, especially if social media is used.

10. Future: Just as advertising dollars have followed consumer eyeballs online, they will shortly follow consumer adoption of mobile community (enabled by smart phones) as the new defining social media dynamic. While new rules of engagement will appear and consumers will increasingly be defined by where they are (hello, Foursquare), much can be divined about how to prepare for the future from current social media practices. Social media evolves quickly so you must stay on top of the latest evolutional trend to take advantage.

What other advantages to social media do you see?

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

When People Read Email

Boomerang For Gmail, a service that allows you to schedule your email through your Chrome browser, recently analyzed 5 million emails and discovered a number of interesting facts.

• Most people read most of their emails from 5AM to 7AM, and read the least from 1PM to 4PM.

• However, most people think that people read their email at 8 to 9AM. 

• The best words to use in the title to get a response are "Apply, Opportunity, Demo, Connect, Payments, Conference, Cancellation."

• The worst words to use in the title are "Confirm, Join, Assistance, Speaker, Press, Social, Invite."

But there's more. The average person gets a lot of email.

• The average email user receives 147 messages every day and spends more than 2 1/2 hours on email every day.

• On average, we delete 71 of those, which takes just under 5 minutes.

• On average, we get 12 messages a day that require substantial work, and they take almost 90 minutes to complete.

• The average person writes 40 email messages a day and each one takes an average of 72 seconds to write.

• Deciding to defer an email for later takes about 10 seconds.

• 77% of people expect a response to their email within 2 days.

If your newsletter is important to your marketing (and you know it is), remember that your fans get a lot of email and you have to stand out from the clutter. Send it at the right time and use the right title to make sure that it's read.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Why Fan Data Matters

It's difficult to read a tech-related story these days without a reference to user data, meta data or the latest "Big Data" (large data sets controlled by mostly large companies), but there are a number of good reasons why this has become a major concern for businesses, and artists and bands, everywhere.

Even politics. You're going to see your user data in action in the upcoming presidential election in a major fashion because, in fact, it's been in use by political campaigns since 2004 as a major way to get out the vote and add donors. And it works. In the private sector, more and more companies and non-profits are taking that data seriously and so should you. Here's why.

The future of marketing is micro-targeting.

The more you know about your fans, the easier it will be to send them only the information that they care about. Why inform a fan in St. Louis that you're doing a gig in Boston? There might be a time that you'd make that information available, but a few days before the show, you just want to concentrate locally, and micro-targeting allows you to do that. What if you have a piece of merch that's aimed at your female fans in cold weather territories? Do you think the dudes care much about it? Do you think you female fans in Florida and Texas care much about it? Micro-targeting allows you to adjust your campaign accordingly.

And it makes measurement easier too. With a more precise user sample, it's much easier to tell if and how a campaign is actually working. If you shotgun a post to 3000 fans and 15 respond, it looks like only .5% responded, but if that same campaign was more precisely aimed at only 30 of those fans and you found that 12 responded, that's a whopping 40%. In the first example with a .5% response, you'd think that your campaign had a serious flaw in it. In the more targeted second example, we can see that the same campaign worked smashingly well. It all depends on targeting the right fans in the first place.

The old advertising days of "50% of advertising works. We just don't know which 50%," may soon be over, thanks to micro-targeting and better measurement techniques. In upcoming posts I'll discuss which data is the most important, and techniques on how to collect it, so you can start micro-targeting right now.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Quality Is A Moving Target

Today I read a good article by Stephen Carmichael on Music Think Tank called "How Google And Search Engine Optimization Changed The Music Industry." In it he puts forth the premise that search engine optimization has changed music because it emphasizes good SEO technique as a means for high search ranking, which in turn means that "quality music" usually takes a backseat to what happens to be currently popular.

One of the examples he shows is how Rebecca Black's viral hit video/song "Friday" still ranks highly on a innocent search of the word "friday." If you were living in a cave last year, "Friday" became a huge hit mostly because it was so bad that you had to experience it at least once. Unless, you were a 13 year-old girl. Then you probably thought it ranked right up there with Justin Bieber in the pantheon of greatest music of all time.

And that's the problem when we try to define "quality music" (or quality anything for that matter). As the saying goes, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." Skrillex's music might be nirvana if you're into EDM, but it might be the depths of audio hell if you're into Nirvana the band. And likewise if you're a big dixieland fan or marching band fan, or classical music fan, or hip-hop fan....... you get the point.

In fact, Frank Sinatra is regarded as one of the greatest singers and musical icons by most of the world (take a look at this footage of Ol' Blue Eyes in the studio), but I had a very knowledgeable and well-thought-of music professor from a major university write me about his poor technique and phrasing and how it crushes him that the masses over-rate him so. Quality is a moving target.

That's one of the reasons that I try to never make blanket statements like "This is bad," "This is good," or "This is mediocre" when doing the weekly song analysis on my Big Picture production blog. What I consider good or bad is probably exactly the opposite of someone out there, and who am I to say that they're wrong?

Music is something that you can't touch, but it can touch you. It's all about how it speaks to you and makes you feel. It might be a hook, an arrangement, a melody or lyric that has that special spark that only you hear, even if the rest of the world doesn't. It's your special connection that takes you to another dimension that maybe only you can get to, and only from one particular song. Who is any one else to dare comment on that connection?

That's why it's so important for an artist to keep searching for an audience, because regardless of what kind of music your doing and your proficiency level, your audience is out there. It may be just a dozen people, but they're waiting for you to find them. The music you make will be really important to them, even if the rest of the world doesn't get it.

Making a hit is really, really hard, even for the best hit makers. When a song becomes a "hit" (meaning that some group of people immensely dig it), it's happened for a reason. There's magic that's involved that should at least be appreciated, even if you can't get your arms around it. Any music that touches the heart of another is special. The smartest in our business know enough to learn from that and apply it to their own work. Because in the end, music quality is a moving target. Hitting the bulls eye is the tough part.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Has EDM Peaked?

Every trend in music has the same trajectory, be it big band, rock n' roll, folk, British invasion, grunge, hip-hop, and now it appears, EDM (electronic dance music). The trend usually follows a path that goes like this:

1. The movement starts out small locally and grows by word of mouth via a small tribe of ardent supporters.
2. As the trend spreads, it picks up more and more followers from city to city and country to country, yet still stays under the radar of the masses as it continues to bubble with excitement.
3. The trend hits critical mass and breaks out with a huge world-wide hit or a breakout artist.
4. At that point every record label scrambles to get in on the act, signing artists of a lesser caliber in the same genre. Professional songwriters begin to adapt their styles to employ the latest trend and are sent to co-write with trend wanna-be's by the record labels and artist management. The music world looks for hits, not art, so it can cash in.
5. The once exciting latest-thing becomes a watered down homogenized version of it's former self, but lives on in the media as the hottest thing for a few years, as the early torch-carriers become slowly demoralized and leave the scene.
6. The trend never really dies, but it diminishes in importance and visibility as it's replaced with something newer and fresher.

Anything sound familiar here? Aren't we up to #5 with EDM?

EDM has been the biggest scene/trend that no one knew about (except those millions of insiders) for the longest time. When a DJ can get 50 to 100,000 people to pack a stadium and hardly cause a ripple in the news, that's still pretty underground. But it doesn't take long until the big money catches on and things change, and that's what's happening in EDM today.

Take a listen to the top songs in just about any pop chart and you'll find products of the EDM trend. David Guetta, Nicki Manaj, Black Eyed Peas, Pitbull, the list goes on but the music unfortunately doesn't get any better as we get contrived songs created for the masses.

As I always say, art is something you do for yourself, a craft is what you do for everyone else. We are now in the craft stage of EDM.

Today we see an article a day on EDM in mainstream media like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, major promoters like Michael Cohl and Bob Sillerman getting involved because they see big bucks they think they can make, major labels on the prowl for new EDM talent at the recent EDMbiz conference, and the rest of the music world trying to catch up to a trend that's already passed them by. See what I mean?

I hate to say it, but it's all downhill from here. EDM will continue to grow for a few more years, but its most vibrant, creative time is probably now behind it.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.