As video technology has gotten cheaper and smaller, it's been a dream of many artists and fans alike to shoot every gig at a venue. While this sometimes happens with the venue using pro equipment, it actually happens anyway with many in the audience holding their phones up to capture the performance.
That's all well and good except it's a pain to hold your arms up for more than 5 minutes at a time, and the act doesn't make anything from the process (except for some additional promotion). Now a beta version of the Soundhalo app may take care of both situations at once.
Soundhalo takes the footage and audio from a production crew at the venue and delivers a fully mastered MP4 video straight to the cloud directly after the song. Fans can then pay to download the song directly to their Android phones one song at a time.
There's a lot of upside here. First of all, the production quality (especially the audio) is better than what can be captured by a phone, the fan can get it immediately so it can be an impulse buy, and the band has an additional income stream.
If venues were smart about it, they'd build this feature into the price of each ticket, but I can see why that probably won't happen. One of the biggest problems of digital commerce is clearances, and live recording can be a hornets nest just waiting to be struck. What if the artist decides to play a song on the spur of the moment that's not under his or her control? There's not time for clearances if the song is available immediately after it's performed. The artist/publisher/Soundhalo also has to pre-clear everything before the gig, and anyone who's ever tried to do that knows that it always takes more time than it should.
S till, for a hungry up and coming band that owns that owns their own publishing gigging in a club, it's a great way to increase revenue (if only slightly) and capture a memory at the same time.
On a similar note, an app called Switchcam allows aggregation of phone camera videos. If your fans are going to record you, you might as well have access to it.
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One of the big problems of the modern digital music industry is bundling, or more accurately, lack of it. Back when the business was a roaring success at the top of its game, the CD album (and before that the vinyl album) brought in most of the revenue. Sure, singles were a reasonable business (at least in the vinyl days), but the album was where the big money was made. Of course, that's all gone away in our current Music 3.0 world where the single song is the king.
Now comes an interesting new bundle that's not exactly an album or movie, but more of a combination of music, video, flyer and store. And it's all built into the same file. The only potential problem is that it's from the service that most creatives love to hate - BitTorrent.
Basically the BitTorrent Bundle is a file that acts as a graphic, telling you anything an advert normally would, but the other pieces can be unbundled as the user buys in. For instance, Ultra, the label that brought you such EDM artists as David Guetta, Tiesto, deadmau5, and Calvin Harris, is trying the new bundle with Kaskade.
The bundle acts as a virtual flyer over social media, and if someone subscribes to his mailing list they then unlock behind-the-scenes footage. Want to buy some music - it's already there. Make a donation, and see some video. It's all up to how to configure it.
The music business needs a new concept in bundling and potentially this could be it. The big problem, of course, is that it's from BitTorrent, which the industry (not to mention artists and songwriters) view it as a bastion for piracy. That said, they do have 170 million active users that you can immediately access.
The Ultra BitTorrent Bundle is a first alpha release, so we don't know what the bugs are yet, but on the surface it's a great concept. Check out this video for more info.
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Probably the holy grail of listening to music is the ability to skip a song when we get bored. It was pretty difficult with vinyl records, easier with CDs, and much easier with digital music. Of course, it's always been impossible with radio, but digital streaming brings us many possibilities.
One of the features siad to be in Apple's new iRadio music streaming service is the ability to skip songs, and apparently that's become a big problem for Sony Music. It's not that they're opposed to it, it's just that they'd like to get paid full rate even if a listener only played the song for a few seconds. Apple would naturally prefer pay a portion of the royalty using a formula that determines the royalty rate based on the amount of the song that's actually listened to.
Of course, whatever is hammered out with Sony will no doubt be applied to the deals with Universal Music and Warner Music Group as well, since it would be a shock if they didn't have a "favored nation" clause built into their agreements that would keep the compensation equal regardless of who got the best deal.
Yet another feature of iRadio is said to be the ability to rewind a song. As a listener, I love the thought of this feature since there are so many times that I'd love to repeat a section of a song to analyze it. The problem then becomes, how much is paid for each rewind and how is that rate determined.
It's funny how some things that we take for granted with music we own become an issue when it comes to streaming. That said, this is another reason why I think that much better days are ahead for songwriters and artists. The compensation may be small but the increased number of revenue streams should increase income substantially.
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Everyone is searching for viral success with one of their videos. There's been books written about it (a good one is Contagious: Why Things Catch On), presentations given at conferences, countless web articles, and much speculation about assumptions and formulas, but few are able to recreate the a success like OK Go's "Here It Goes Again," Rebecca Black's "Friday," Baauer's "Harlem Shake," or Psy's "Gangnam Style" (not to mention the numerous cat videos that routinely make the rounds).
But is it possible that what we think of as viral isn't actually viral after all? A number of recent articles and presentations propose that these videos were given a big corporate helping hand first before getting any kind of traction.
Take for instance Psy's "Gangnam Style." In a recent article on Pando, Brandon Mendelson postulates that the video's success is "actually the tail end of months and months of preparation, buying fake views and comments, an extensive PR campaign, and his video fitting a very specific need for the business model that fuels the web: The Page View Based Economy."
He goes on to state that Psy's record company purchased views and comments by using companies like Microworkers and Fiverr to trick the YouTube algorithm into thinking the video was exploding. It actually was, only as a result of gaming the system.
Another article by Keven Ashton on Quartz points out that Baauer's "Harlem Shake" had only a few thousand views as a result of YouTube comic George Miller's video compilation. It was only after Warner Brother's owned Maker Studios made a version of the video to promote the studio itself and promoted it across it's many YouTube channels and Twitter did the video begin to get some traction. Other companies, DJs and bloggers jumped on, mostly to promote themselves, which caused Baauer's record label to take notice and begin its own promotion. Ashton provides a pretty thorough blow by blog of how it all took place, and it a lot less to do with what we think "viral" is rather than self-promotion. Here's the very first version the "Harlem Shake."
The gist of both articles is that what we believe and what's reality are frequently two different things when it comes to social media. It's becoming easier to manipulate many of the metrics that we use to measure success, if you have the money.
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Yesterday Google introduced its new streaming music service called All Access, but surprise, surprise - it's not the same one that's been rumored for months.
Previous reports had it that Google's new service would be built around YouTube, which made a lot of sense since the majority of people discover new music through that video service anyway. It seems that both services will live in parallel, the difference being that All Access will be subscription only with no free tier. Users will have to pay $10 per month for the service ($8 if you subscribe by the end of June) with a 30 day free trial.
While we don't know for sure what's in store over at YouTube, We do have a little more information about the list of All Access features. It appears to combine your personal music collection with any available tracks in their catalog into a single searchable library, and of course, Google excels at search so everything should be easy to find. It also has auto-recommendation-based radio stations that allow you to customize your playlists.
A couple of things about Google All Access are very interesting:
1. Google beat Apple to the punch. The tough part about launching any kind of digital music service is making a deal with the major labels. The fact that Google accomplished this before Apple probably means that the labels pushed for a better deal and got it. This had the dual purpose of stymying Apple's attempts as well, as the company has reportedly only recently upped the terms of what they were willing to pay, and still haven't completed deals with Warners and Sony.
2. There's another service vying for marketshare. Although Amazon is king of the hill in terms of online retailers, their music site hasn't made nearly the mark that was anticipated, especially when you consider the marketshare that Android phones enjoy. As more and more consumers discover the joy of accessing music versus owning it, the marketshare that it has (about 13%) could shift in a hurry, especially if Apple doesn't introduce its service in the short term. Google as a behemoth company stands on the same ground as Amazon, and could easily eat their digital lunch and maybe Apple's too when it's all said and done. After all, they have an installed base of all those Android phones.
As has been the theme here lately, we're witnessing a big change in the music business occur right before our eyes, and it's going to be better for musicians in the long run. Today every artist and songwriter complains about the meager revenue they receive from streaming, but remember that as of now it's only expected to total $1.7 billion at the end of 2013. Considering that iTunes throws off twice that in royalties to the major labels alone every year, you can see where this is eventually going to go. Unfortunately, no royalty details were mentioned during the announcement yesterday (no surprise there).
Streaming probably won't replace the income of the glory days of CDs, but things will eventually be better than they are now in the transition period from one distribution method (downloads) to another (streaming).
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