Social Media Week | Future of the Music Industry Discussion Featuring QuestLove

February 4, 2010 by Lindsey E.  
Filed under FEATURED, THE DAILY

7 Comments

Quite a bit of speculation-fog continues to loom over the future of the music industry and its hierarchy. Arguments can be made that, soon, brands will work directly with artists – omitting record labels and changing the definition of A&R completely. There was no better place to sift insight than at Social Media Weeks’ panel discussion thrown by SoundCtrl and No Longer Empty (the non-profit that fills vacant NYC store fronts with amazing art and exhibits) titled “What Is Your $ocial Currency?” – the only event of the week focused on music AND new media. Held at the old Tower Records space on 4^th and Broadway, DJ Zeke spun a crowning mix of old school and modern hip hop as former Columbia Records exec and Co-Founder of BeEverywhere.tv James Andrews moderated panelists QuestLove of The Roots, Pepsi’s Senior Marketing Manager Andrew Katz, and Marisa Bangash of Uncensored Interview.

DJ Zeke

When asked if Tribes were intentionally built into DNA of The Roots business model, ?uestLove asserts that it wasn’t. Social media made it possible for him to have “personal interaction [that] wasn’t necessarily a fan club.” Dissatisfied with fan clubs of the past where you’d sign up, mail in, and get an “autographed” photo of Whitney Houston or whomever, ?uestLove wanted to “create a place to communicate with fans.” It wasn’t until 2 years went by did he realize what an impact this conversation had on the bands’ bottom line. “The power of our following on the net is what convinced the label to let us out.” Concerned with the amount of money their label was pumping into the band in relation to the yield, ?uest made the case for Geffen’s more efficient approach. “Your audience is on the internet!”

“Do brands want to be famous?” Andrew Katz expressed Pepsi’s commitment to “adding value to the conversation” today’s consumer is having within its culture. “The world doesn’t need another Britney Spears,” he says. They don’t want to just staple themselves to what’s hot now, but embed themselves into the very nature what’s NEXT. “We want to be iconic.” B.B. King, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe – not simply famous. “What he said,” ?uest says in agreement followed by a roareous laugh from the crowd – he couldn’t have said it better himself. I’ll note that Pepsi announced in December 2009 its plans to forgo the traditional route of Super Bowl ads this year and will pump the $20 Million dollar budget into online and social media. The boldest move by any major brand, yet.

Marisa Bangash and Katz agree that labels are just middle men and that the days of “brands as content distributors and curators” could be in sight. “The Roots album – brought to you by Downy!” ?uestLove chimes in with a chuckle. But this could very well be the most viable way for all parties – the artist and consumer – to be satisfied with the music experience. “Music should be a utility bill,” ?uest says. The argument for artists to be empowered by their content – and not a slave to it – is very much here. “The Roots have always operated outside of record sell,” ?uestLove states proudly. “I learned from the beginning I have to produce, write, drum, blog for others…[I had to] be ubiquitous…be so spread out that the label couldn’t drop us.” He’s surprised that most artists are still relying solely on record sales. His advice? “Artists must change their mentality – be more creative. What else can you do? Can you blog? Can you teach?”

And the A&R guy? “He’s the new ad agency,” says Katz. ?uestLove references the breakout success of hot new artist Santigold being measured not by album or single sales – but by licensing deals inked (Prefixmag.com estimates that up to 75% of her debut album has already been licensed to the likes of beer and hair product commercials). “It’s the new platinum record.”

Run Tweet That.™

Photos by Nick McGlynn

Like many of you, for the past few years I’ve been using Google Reader to subscribe to blogs and news feeds. Instead of having to go out and scan each and every one of my favorite blogs for new and interesting content, I can read; share; tag; favorite and organize my favorite posts directly in Google Reader. It saves me a valuable abundance of time.

Google Reader is not only one of the best RSS feed aggregators out there, but it can also be used as a powerful system to archive rss feed data you may want to access in the future. Anything that has an RSS feed can be backed up and archived with Google Reader for access long after the feed is gone. Here are just a few ideas on the types of data you can archive this way.

How do you know if an RSS feed is available for the site you’re browsing? Just keep an eye out for the RSS icon. Those little orange “RSS” icons are littered all over the web, and they are so common that sometimes we don’t even notice they are there. Well…start noticing them!

Archive Your Tweets

One of the primary ways I use Google Reader as an archive is for backing up my Twitter stream. If you’ve ever tried to go back and find something you tweeted last year, you’ll realize it is a slow and painful process using the Twitter interface. However, by adding it to Google Reader you’ll be able to load and browse through your timeline much quicker since the data is actually stored by Google, not by Twitter.

You can tag, search, organize, and share past Tweets exactly the same way you can with all of your other items in Google Reader. This in itself is extremely powerful. For example, maybe you’ve recently conversed with a potential customer on Twitter and you’d like to keep your statements on record and easily accessible. Simple enough: tag those Tweets with something like “prospect.” Later in time if you wish to re-visit that conversation, just go to the “prospect” tag in Reader.

Keeping with the Twitter theme, you can also archive Twitter searches. If you recently participated in a Twitter-based chat around a specific hash-tag, simply grab the RSS link from a search query for that hash-tag on search.twitter.com and you’ll be able to read the details of that chat months down the road. Anything that is search-able can be archived by Reader, not just hash-tags. You can keep a backlog of results for any search query and just archive the RSS feed of the results.

Archive the RSS Feed of Your Blog Content

Since most of what folks read in Google Reader are blog posts, it’s no surprise that it can function as an archive for your own blog. While you should always be backing up your blog database itself anyways, Reader can act as a backup to your backup. You’ll still be able to browse the content of each and every blog post you’ve written in the event of a crash.

Along with your actual blog posts, you can usually also grab an RSS feed for the comments that people leave on your blog. Once again, you’ll be able to utilize all of Reader’s features to organize, tag, search, and share past comments.

Archive Your To-Do List

In the past I’ve tried several different free “to-do” apps and recently found that Ta-Da List by 37Signals (also free) allows me to collaborate with my clients on prioritizing and completing small updates for them. This app conveniently offers an RSS feed that is updated every time a task gets added or marked as completed. Adding that feed to Reader, I am able to go back and view each and every task we’ve worked on together through time, whether it’s still listed in Ta-Da List or not.

If It’s Available In RSS, Feed It To Reader

Google Reader is free and will most likely always be free. So far there’s no limit on how many feeds you can add to it. Take advantage of that. Any RSS-enabled data that you may want to archive for future retrieval should go into Google Reader. It’s definitely an app that is useful for more than just reading blogs.

Are you using Google Reader to archive any other types of RSS-enabled data? Share your tips!

Posterous, a company that wants to make it super-easy for anyone to publish their own blog, has raised $4.4 million in its first round of institutional funding.

The San Francisco company’s big selling point is its simplicity — just send an email with the title, text, and media that you want to post to post@posterous.com, and Posterous handles everything else. If it’s your first time using the site, Posterous even creates your blog for you. Its closest competitor is Tumblr, but Posterous has found an audience of its own, and told TechCrunch it now has 12 million unique monthly visitors.

The funding was led by Redpoint Ventures, where Posterous already had a connection, since Redpoint partner Satish Dharmaraj already backed the company as an angel investor. Trinity Ventures, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital, Brian Pokorny, Aydin Senkut, and XG Ventures also participated in the funding. (Senkut is also an investor in VentureBeat.)

Posterous has now raised about $5.1 million in funding. It was incubated by Y Combinator, and in fact Y Combinator runs a blog on Posterous.

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Companies: Posterous, Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures

People: Satish Dharmaraj

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