SF Music Tech 2014
Where’s the Cash for Musicians Today and Beyond?
Dave Cool:sound recordings weren't a big component of revenues for artists but they are also a reason to go on tour
Zack O. Greenburg:there are so many different formats - don't print up CDs unless you tour because people want a souvenir
you'd be surprised how much some of your superfans would want to donate to you to thank you for your music
INgrooves :what about publishing and licensing? isn't thar a different story from recording?
SoundExchange:revenue used to come from mechanicals - from recording -now it comes from performance and has metadata issues
not just you have to get your metadaat right but also the people paying you need to
INgrooves :if you have a hit song, it can be your 401k for a long time @bandpage: so just write a hit song?
Kristin Thomson:it's knowing what your options are to get revenue from at each stage of the cycle are the pennies getting to you?
SoundExchange:we found 29 revenue streams for musician in october, now they are up to 45 see money.futureofmusic.org
often it was @soundexchange that surprised people as it is a new source of revenue
Zack O. Greenburg:last year we gave out $600M, and it will probably be over $700M next year
we work on non-interactive radio like pandora and other indirect licenses. Pandora then Sirius then 2500 others
we pay artists directly and not through labels so no recoupables get taken out of it
terrestrial radio pays ASCAP/BMI for the songwriters but not to performers, so we are working on that now
Dave Cool:streaming services do pay the performer as well as the songwriter, unlike terrestrial radio
BandPage:there are lots of differrent kinds of fan - casual listeners and superfans want everything you are doing
we have a metal band that sells branded voodoo dolls and their fans are buying them
INgrooves :in the gaming business, games were offline, and they had no idea how much you played it. Now they know how much time
this tracking is now happening in music - with CDs we had no idea how big a fan they were, streaming tells us this
knowing how to target our customers - our fans - is what we are going through which happened to gaming in 2007
by knowing the people who listen to them on spotify and rdio we can increase tour revenue by reaching fans
BandPage:you don't have to spend as much money throwing it out into the dark, you can look at the data coming back in
Zack O. Greenburg:now I can hand the flyer to the person who listened to me 25 times and invite the one who listened 500 times to meet
@Patreon is doing well too - every time you release it give them money
we don't care as bandpage how you are making revenue -we'll pull in anything thta helps bands
INgrooves :the CD is a dead object, it doesn't tell you anything; artists can tell where music is being streamed
BandPage:there are artists that don't want to ask fans for money - thye offer a preorder rather than a donation
Dave Cool:us up and coming bands never made a lot of money, even when we had CDs to sell
it's made a huge dip at the high end but as an up and coming band you are still looking for fans individually
you need to think about how you can interact with fans, and try things out. It's still hard as a small business
Zack O. Greenburg:you're selling socks at Times Square with thousands of other sock sellers in Times Square
Dave Cool:if you were a band with a great album and no money what would you do?
Kristin Thomson:rehearse you live show so it is great so everyone talks about it on social media
SoundExchange:do you have an intra-band agreement on how the revenue is split between you? you have to pay royalties forever
proper credits are the baseline for your music to discover you and for people like soundexchange to pay you
BandPage:I do live shows with bands in LA, and I look them up on soundexchange and there is often money waiting for them
we have a problem that sending out letters saying we have money for people looks like spam
INgrooves :think of your band as a business and look up your customer demographics and try to open for bands in it
I was sleeping on the floor eating rice and beans when we started bandpage, a band is like a startup
Dave Cool:I wouldn't spend all my money on making a recording, I'd spend some on working out who your fans are and where
BandPage:if I was a band who'd spent all it's money I'd get a day job or play covers or teach - work a job to pay the bills
INgrooves :any in-person experience sells very well, whether that's a backstage pass or meet and greet
fans aren't musicians - they've never been backstage in a shitty pub, they still want to meet you
take any old merch or piece of inventory, sign it and you can mark it up 20%
BandPage:if you create that connection that fan engagement they remember it and stick around for life
Dave Cool:do a house concert - you can make $500 from that which is often more than small venues
Zack O. Greenburg:doing a surprise release can work great if you're an artist who has years of label marketing behind you
Dave Cool:I've seen songwriters being broken by having placement in a commercial - that can be a surprise
BandPage:knowing who you are as an artist and telling that story and engagaing with fans is part of the job now
SoundExchange:the world is changing, not just in music - it's exciting because it's not just through social networks but streaming
we used to get traffic through facebook, but now they only show a post to 6% unless you pay; streaming hits more
it's public and factual that consumers aren't paying for the song so we have to generate revenue other ways
it used to be patronage, then it was troubadours, then bands in venues, and the jukebox broke that
the music business has changed a lot, it keeps changing but people need music and will support the musician
BandPage:I don't know what the pricing model should be on streaming, I'd pay more than $10/month
pandora pays a lot more for a stream on subscription than on the free service
we're going to solve this. there are fans who see value in the music that you create, and we will get this to you
Virtual Music Collaboration
bryanmichaelcox. ♐️:TRI Studios:I've been in the music business since the 1990s, so I've seen the transition from tape to DAW
we just switched to having a mac mini instead of a dedicated workstation
we can collaborate now, but we still have trouble moving between tracks and sessions in different software
it is easier now - I've been collaborating with a writer in london and we made 8 recordings together in a week
i collaborated with an artist I heard on twitter I never met in person but we recorded together sending tracks
whenever we sold a record we'd have to book another studio to take our DAT tapes into to make a 2" master
to be part of that era and to see how simplified it is now is amazing
bryanmichaelcox. ♐️:if you're a recording engineer now coming through college you need to get your IT skills down
Steve Martocci:whats amazing now is that artists can do it themselves - when Prince did it he was a genius, now it's normal
you can go out on YouTube and find out the secrets of the producers and make your own style up
I remember the Hit Factory closed, and Sony Music Studios closed, and people are doing it all themselves
people say "technology is fucking up music and no-one is doing real shit" and I met a guy who recorded an EP live
Jimbo Lattimore:we want to bring technology to the musicians so they don't have to mess with files and make it smoother
Chris Kantrowitz:the production tools are in the hands of the people and anyone can make a record, but some people shouldn't
Steve Martocci:the way tehcnology has been built around audio is all these walled gardens - plugins, operating systems, DAWs
in audio the document problem has not been solved, and musicians have to make choices
hopefully companies will be more sensible about their IP so we can plug in as easily as a guitar
anything we can do to put artists back into a state of flow is important
TRI Studios:all 3 of us had to build custom code to move music between the different creation tools to make that work
easy sharing of session files and public sharing - it's like version control in software for music
so much in music is catching up to what we have had for software for years
Steve Martocci:it seems like audio has fallen behind, why is that?
bryanmichaelcox. ♐️:we're in the least sexy part of the music industry, improving workflows
Jimbo Lattimore:that's sad though - this is where it starts collaborating across the wire - it's still a process to convert
the less time that you have to spend figuring out how to start up the more time you get to create
Chris Kantrowitz:downtime kills creativity - we want you to stop having to be an IT guy and get back to making music
TRI Studios:a lot of these music companies were founded 20 years ago and never got the open source revolution
the iOS platform enabled an explosion of creativity but we need to bring that together with these old tools
plugins are the hardest because they are like a custom instrument inside a song, and they are expensive too
unifying plugins is really needed
archiving is also really hard - good luck opening that ProTools session from 20 years ago with the plugins
it's companies like us saying "fuck you oldschool, we're doing it ourselves"
Jimbo Lattimore:are you incorporating metadata into these tools?
Steve Martocci:we are tracking the metadata from the plugins as we write them
Chris Kantrowitz:we track every save so we can see who made which edit when
we have had to make our own licence the splicence to make it easier to share, as even CC is not clear enough
Steve Martocci:this business is so huge - we have users in 120 countries around the world - 3000 people in the Congo use it
I hope that there are so many companies that create collaborative tools that all this music survives
bryanmichaelcox. ♐️:i think you'll see a lot of products come into this space, but there are no comps - we model on github
we model on github but we had to build the whole stack not just the social layer
we're working with walled gardens and there is a lot of intelligence to break down those walls
Steve Martocci:I'm into problem solving - when I'm stuck I'll go look for tools to fix it with google
the business of music is changing, and that effects what happens in a creative perspective too
when you come into music now you're learning a new business at the same time as joining the business
there used to be a known process to get into the music business, that is no longer true it is changing so much
this is all new even for a guy like me who's been in the business for 20 years
Jimbo Lattimore:we use the session file data to see all the different tracks and stems in the files, so you can distribute them
instead of distributing 2 mixed tracks, think of your music as a seed that can spread into different mixes
Chris Kantrowitz:we're trying to avoid the music distribution issue and focus on the creation of it - musician to musician
bryanmichaelcox. ♐️:one thing I've appreciated about the disruption of music is that artists and entrepreneurs are the same thing
our goal is to build something broad enough that anyone can use it
the future of music is "oh shit, there are no rules any more" - it's a golden age of music
who fucking knows what people are going to do in 5 years with music- artists are smart, they'll work it out
it's going to be awesome when people have tools in their hand to do shit and not be trapped by the walls
TRI Studios:the record business as we know it is over and we are directly in the middle of the new frontier
the younger generation has no experience of what purchasing music is
we need to find a way we can haul music into a revenue model
you can't go platinum here but can sell 10M in asia, but they sell digital too
in asia, even if they are streaming, they still buy records over there and are amazed we don't
Chris Kantrowitz:how are you working to get sync licences?
Steve Martocci:there are a lot of people working on film scores that sue our product to sync up with quicktime files
the older companies - the advertising agencies and film companies are still hung up on security
you need to decide whether you are going to work in enterprise and big iron or in the disruptive world
Jimbo Lattimore:we avoid the big studio model and work with networks of independent or bedroom producers
Chris Kantrowitz:once people are collaborating with our tool we want to opt into a seedplexing opportunity
we work with 20 different DAWs across mac and windows
Steve Martocci:when they were raising money for protools there were only 200 recording studios, so had that as a worldview
a lot of workflows have been the same for so long - so many walled gardens make it difficult to collaborate
20 years ago if you said "I'll share my source code with you" they'd have laughed, we're doing that in music
Chris Kantrowitz:we're seeing a lot of people share their music to teach, to be though leaders
other people want to see what others will make from their work
we're building a system that rewards you from being more open
that sync licence may be out there a few remixes aways
Steve Martocci:if you think how many people go to school to make music it's far more than there are jobs available
the notion of being proprietary is going away -we share everything now
bryanmichaelcox. ♐️:we learned this with source code - we can do more with shared code
educating people on how to use DAWs is hard
Steve Martocci:most creatives, we don't read the manual - we just try it out and come up with our own way
TRI Studios:we open sourced a track from Henry Fong a few weeks ago and someone said they learned so much from it
what we learned today is "stay in school" and "sharing is good"
API Ecosystem
Kim Lane:Bill Hajjar:I evangelise APIs - not any one API but all APIs
Antti Silventoinen:I'm the CEO of Senzari a semantic graph based api for music
Steven Willmott:I'm from music kickup a full service house for artists and labels. we're announcing an API for music dsitribution
Justin Woo:I'm the CEO of @3scale we are an API infrastructure company that powers over 500 APIs, including musicmatch jamendo
music has an emotional component which is not there with, say a construction API
Antti Silventoinen:I work for Braintree - recently we have an easy API that helps us use multiple payment APIs
we use a lot of the social APIs like twitter and FB to make sense of the data our customers have
Justin Woo:consuming APIs have been crucial for product development; our entire product is built on an internal API
we want the distribution API to be free so we can commoditize distribution to solve licensing and rights issuse
music APIs have grown because the rights issues are complex and you don't want to do something illegal
3scale:when you see shitty developer documentation, you ask "what were they thinking" - developers are consumers of docs
if you put code samples out there people will copy and paste them so they need to be extremely robust
Justin Woo:you are creating a dependency between you and the users of the API—if you take it away thats worse than not having it
Antti Silventoinen:once you release an API people are going to use it forever - there's always someone on the classic API
we were thinking of using the soundcloud API as a way to pull in the music, but it was failing 50% of the time
there is always a business risk involved with depending on someones API
one of the things that is crucial is what am I going to carry on my back, and what can be a partners's API
for example when we give analytics out we use google charts so we don't have to do that part ourselves