by DMEC Careers Della Huff and Chris Finegold

Internet and Social Networks

Content and Distribution

Mobile

Hardware

Greetings from your new DMEC music industry expert. As a musician, I’d like to kick off my first blog posting with some information around how musicians currently use technology to increase attendance at shows, promote their music, and break into the industry…without the hassle of actually having to play in front of a studio executive. Let’s start from the beginning…say you are a new artist, just wrote and recorded your first few songs (using these iPhone apps), and want to let your friends know about your talents. Where can you post them? Well, myspace and a facebook fan page are the obvious places to start. But assuming you have decided to monetize this hobby and have published a CD with a bar code (through discmakers.com), you can work through cdbaby.com to stream your songs on lala.com, amazon, zune, rhapsody, and itunes, and even have your songs appear at the top of a google search (through lala). Yeah, if you have a bar code, it’s just that easy. In fact, you could probably belch into a microphone 35 different ways and those unique sounds could appear on itunes within a month. If you would like a review of those belches to show up on itunes, you could drop $75 and have radioindy.com write one for you. (It is important to note that you do actually have to apply to get your songs on pandora or most other radio programs.)

Now, say you actually recorded legitimate music and aspired to perform at a bar or club …where should you start? Well, you could always conduct a google search to find the local venues, and email the bar managers individually (then harass them in person when they don’t respond), or you could pay a small monthly fee to sonicbids.com to conduct an extensive search of not only local venues looking for musicians, but also festivals and competitions. If you were successful in securing a gig and wanted to inform all of your closest virtual friends on facebook, myspace, and twitter of this momentous occasion, you could set up an account on artistdata.com, enter the date, time and location of the event, and artistdata would automatically send an announcement to all of these sites and update any music calendar you may have.

And success! You have made it! Or have you? “I’m tired of the bar scene,” you say after 3 shows. “It’s time to take it to the next level.” As an impatient musician, overconfident in your abilities, you can then pay an annual subscription of $300 to taxi.com to have the opportunity to submit your songs ($5 for each song) to music industry executives looking to sign you (or a more talented version of you) and place your music in ads, movies, and TV shows.

So good luck and remember that if after 2 or 3 submissions, you still haven’t made it, there’s always the magic of a viral youtube video…

Since we started our Haas business school experience we dare to say that the 5th San Francisco Music and Technology Summit last week is the best experience we had so far. Why? Simply because it has absolutely everything we love: music, entertainment, entrepreneurship, music legends, independent musicians and much more.

Our ambassadors having a good time at the sfmusictech mixer

We, Jason Dolan, Adithya Jayachandran and Miguel Martinez went to the event in the Hotel Kabuki at SanFran as Haas and DMEC ambassadors. As soon as we arrived we felt that warmth and cool vibe of the music industry mixed with the dynamics of technology and entrepreneurship.

Brian Zisk and his production team pulled together an amazing event with high quality panelists and public.

The keynote of the day was the presentation of the just released Google Music, a music discovery helper. It’s a search feature of Google which allow users to access songs, videos or lyrics directly with a simple search input like a band’s name, lyrics or any other info that relates to what you are looking for. The content is provided by different partners that where present in that keynote such as My Space, Gracenote, Pandora and You Tube (it’s really cool. Check it out!). One phrase that caught our attention in this panel were the words of RJ Pittman, Google’s Director of Product Management: “in Google our most important metric is ‘customer happiness’ “. This is the reason why they are doing this. Besides, we think is the least invasive way to enter into the music market. Interesting.

The audience during one of the many panels of the day

One of the main discussions among the public was that if this was another way to get free music easier, but the consensus was the benefits are greater than the costs, especially because the search considers a few protections such as only reproducing a song once between a given period of time.

Other important topic that was present across almost every panel was how bands use My Space these days. The previous consensus was that My Space is basically dead when it comes to promoting a band. But the new partnership with Google Music ignited the idea that updating and using a My Space site would be again a useful tool for band promotion. Although the idea is consistent, all panelists agreed that if a band’s website appears below a band’s My Space site, they are doing something wrong.

A third interesting discussion was generated in the live events panel with members like Zack Darling, organizer of Burning Man. While the panel was having a discussion about the use of mobile devices in concerts by the audience to influence the performance, interact with the musicians and to inform friends and other people what is happening trough tools such as Twitter and Facebook, they also debated about the problems with coverage from mobile carriers. Obviously, there are economic and technical issues with increasing bandwidth and coverage for specific events or locations, but this tendency is seen as a potential for future massive use. Still, question remains unanswered.

One of the panels during the summit

Finally we just want to mention that being in the Producing and Mastering panel was simply amazing. Legends that worked with artists like Santana, the Death Kennedys, Neil Young and Janis Joplin were in it. Even though it was a technical conversation, some really interesting insights were discussed. For example the historical shift between pro audio and home studios because of technology. This new way of doing things is here to stay. At the same side, avoiding the classic mentoring/teaching system will mean the end of some of the greatest techniques in the music industry. Efforts like educational interactive material could somehow diminish this problem and there are current efforts in that direction.

You can listen to all the panels in the summit’s website.

Stephan Jenkins, Third Eye Blind 3eb! / True Meaning

The last speaker of the day was Stephen Jenkins, musician from Third Eye Blind, who was also present in the last summit in May of 2009. He talked (a better description would be tried to talk) about the latest release of his band, which was made without any major label behind it using all the technology available nowadays. He also commented on his charity project, true meaning.

The day ended with the cocktail party where we all relaxed and had a few drinks in honor of DMEC and the opportunity of being there. At the end of this blog you’ll a find a few photos that illustrate the good time we had.

For the end and according to us, the best quotes from all the panels:

1. “You’ve got 7 seconds to impress your audience” – Jay Frank

2. “Music consumption is higher than ever” – Jeff Sass

3. “What is popular enough? – not having a day job” – The ‘Getting to Popular’ Panel

4. “Every piece of content is abstracted and available via API” – Lee Martin

5. “Gone are the days you are going to build something and figure out how to monetize later” – Mark Sugarman

6. To musicians: “Get your own URL” – The ‘Social Networking: The Future For Musicians’ Panel

7. “Play live. Meet people. Make direct connections.” – Stephan Jenkins

8. “Pro tools killed big studios” – Ken Walden

9. “Greatest marketing tool: live show” – Zoe Keating

10. “Life is too short not to pursue what you are passionate about” – Jeff Yasuda

We are just looking forward for the next summit! We’ll surely be there.

Jason, Adithya and Miguel, Music Industry Experts of DMEC

Summit featured on NBC Bay Area News 12/7/09

One of the advantages of spending the summer in a big tech company is meeting writers / singers / miscellaneous interesting characters who come to talk to 30-100 of us at a time.  These people are like exotic specimens in the fish tank at the dentist’s office… which is why we call these presentations “fish bowls”.

A couple of weeks ago we met Marie Digby. Marie who? Marie the very talented and beautiful singer… that’s who. After she sang for us, she broke out of her shell and handled some Q&A. It turns out that Marie spent a full year recording her album in 2006. Her label, however, wasn’t inclined to release it, mainly considering the marketing efforts needed to promote an anonymous singer. Marie was kind of desperate, she had heard of other singers with albums never getting released. As this industry works, she can’t take the album elsewhere. That is when the proverbial friend told her to put some songs on YouTube. Marie’s cover of Umbrella, which has 8 million views to date, received Jay-Z’s praise when he told her that it was the best of the 200 covers he had heard. The label, now with a heavy dose of viral marketing, decided to release her album last April and now she is touring. The rest is history (still to be made).

Where the hell is Matt? Harding, spent an hour with us sharing stories from around the world. If you missed him, Matt is the guy dancing his geeky, silly dance on every corner of the globe. The video he released in June already has 7.5 million views. Matt was originally a game developer who liked to do his goofy dance. His first video was published before the YouTube era and got enough attention to connect him with Stride Gum, his sponsor until this very day. His second video has almost 11 million views, and his third was just released. Matt works on these projects full time. If you think it is a lot of fun going all over the world and dancing, you are probably right. But Matt actually spends typically no more than a day in each destination so I guess he spends most of his time on air planes.

To me it’s amazing how a medium that didn’t exist a few years ago is already responsible for the creation and promotion of new artists. If it wasn’t for YouTube these artists wouldn’t be where they are. Video on the internet is disrupting the way art is created. We decided that our next >play conference will be about disruption. You should be there.

I attended a meet-up today on the Open Media Web during which the presenter from Creative Commons commented on the irrelevance of whether record labels stay in business. Time will tell how many musicians will manage to make a living from music as a primary source of income, but, with the unlimited shelf space of the internet and the draw to making music, it seems certain there will be no shortage of music for us to enjoy.

As the WGA strike carries on, does the same logic apply to Hollywood? There’s certainly an abundance of video on the web. As the industry loses “share of attention” (and revenues) to web video, where does independent film-making fit into all this? Does a union still serve a purpose? Seeing as any video can find its way onto the unlimited shelf space of the internet (and our mail from Netflix), can working with producers willing to fairly compensate writers provide an attractive alternative to union bargaining with studios? (Despite the career benefits of striking reported on by Marketplace: the opportunity for less-established writers to network.)

For a humorous take, I enjoyed this inside report on the negotiations between screen writers and studios (as well as the text at the very bottom of that blogger’s site). My favorite line: “Bunch of smelly hippies, stealing our intellectual property is what the Internet is.”

(Some back and forth on Derek Powazek’s blog got me thinking about this.)