On Hiatus

As I'm sure you can tell from the lack of updates, this blog is currently on hiatus.

I have had to stop posting due to a lack of free time as I am working and studying for a qualification at the same time.

I continue to keep on top of tech/media trends but at present do not have the time to offer my own insights and regularly attend related events in the London startup scene.

I'll be back. In the meantime, follow my Twitter feed

twitter.com/nicklevine

Sofia Talvik On DIY Social Media Marketing Strategy

This posting is an interview from LA based Swedish musician on how she manages her own social media marketing strategy.

I've only done one interview on this blog before notably with the founders of the Tweet Tweet Club. I was motivated to get in touch with Sofia due to the innovative way in which she was using Twitter to promote her summer single Strawberries.

The MP3 single is what Gerd Leonhard would call a "feels like free" solution. Fans pay for the single by having to send out an automated Tweet advertising the single, alongside a unique hasthag.

What struck me was not just how savvy Sofia is in terms of an artist promoting herself, but also how her digital strategy seems to be light years ahead of the marketing departments at major record labels.

1. I initially decided to get in touch with you due to the Twitter campaign for your new single, Strawberries. Whose idea was it to use Twitter to help market the single, and what has the feedback from the campaign so far been like?

I've been working a lot with social networking sites such as twitter lately. 9 million people use twitter so when you want to spread the word about something it's a great place to start. People have really appreciated that telling their friends on twitter as a payment for the single, even now when everyone can download the single for free, people still push the twitter button.

2. Has the issue of users having to input their Twitter passwords to access the download been much of an issue? This is a concern which I raised on Twitter but to your credit you were very fast to respond to this.

There's been one or two who opposed to the idea. I can understand that it may feel unsafe to enter your password, but like I've stated on the site and when people addressed me on twitter, no information about logins or password is ever saved on our servers.

3. It’s interesting to see that for the Twitter campaign you aren’t actually asking fans to sign up to a mailing list. Is this a conscious shift on your behalf away from “push” marketing to “pull” marketing. (In “pull marketing” consumers are the ones who decide if they want to create or extinguish a relationship i.e. the follow/unfollow option on Twitter)

Well the good thing is that when you ask someone to thell their friends on twitter, this message goes out to hundred or thousands of people as opposed to the one email address I would get for my newsletter,which by the way is easy to unsubscribe from. That way my music can reach so many more people. In a way you can call it pull marketing, but at the same time each person automatically helps me to pull all their friends too.

4. You seem to be very active on a plethora of social media/social networking sites. I actually remember a couple of years ago you requested my friendship on Last.FM. How do you decide which networks to build a presence on?

It's pretty easy to see if a network is functional or not. You test out the usability of it, and the popularity. Tons of social networking sites pops up every day, and I guess as many disappear every day. And they also have to be compatible with things like ping.fm and iLike. If I would keep track of 15-20 sites each day, doing updates and stuff I wouldn't have time to do any music. If I post a blog on iLike it's published on all my accounts, facebook, twitter etc. I've also just released an iPhone app through iLike. It's a great site.

5. Do you do this all of yourself or do you have people to build and manage these platforms for you?

I do most of it myself. I have some technical help from my husband who is a wiz on finding new usuable plug ins and have a lot of cool ideas that we try out. If the question really is - is it me writing stuff on these pages the answer is yes. You'r not chatting with a marketing department ;-).

6. It’s interesting to see that you are on Linked In as I only know a handful of musicians who are. What is the split in how you use this in terms of managing the professional side of your music career alongside networking with fans?

It's very different. When it comes to fans you want as many as possible. I almost never denu anyone friendship on facebook or myspace. When it comes to the professional side of it, you want to gather connections to a handful talented people, not everyone who works with music in some way or another.

7. Your connection with Bernard Butler on MySpace has been well documented. Have you formed any other connections online with people who have had a significant effect on your music career?

The talanted musician Joszef Nemeth who played the piano on my second album was also a myspace find, not to mention all the great artists who contributed to the Street of Dreamix remixes. My new american label partner also found me through the internet, it's just an easy way to connect with people.

8. Have you got any favourite tools for monitoring your own online buzz? I.e. Google Alerts, Addictomatic etc.

I have Google Alerts, Twitter search etc. But I mostly search for stuff about me when I release something.

9. The likes of Montt Mardie and Hello Saferide have written lyrics or whole songs about the internet. As a fellow Swedish artist, is this something you would consider?

I would never say never, but the thought hasn't struck me yet. Music is still very organic for me, and the internet isn't.

Thanks to Sophia for giving up her time to be interviewed. You can download the Strawberries MP3 here

Barnet Council Helps Build Facebook's Brand Equity

This isn't a criticism of Barnet Council per se, more of an observation. Logically, it makes sense to target platforms with the biggest user base. In a similar way to how advertising dollars go where the audience is, the public sector are attempting to harness platforms which receive the most attention.

Alongside the previous blog post, this serves as an example of how both the public and private sector are inadvertantly helping to build brand equity in social media services.

Follow Barnet Council on Twitter @barnetcouncil

Twitter enters the mainstream lexicon

Spotted at Finchley Road underground station on 9 May 2009.

URL Shorteners

The photo featured in this blog post is an example of how not to promote a URL.

Do the proprietors of the restaurant genuinely believe that their customers will be able to remember an address that long and tenuous?

The image serves as being a great example of how URLs don't always translate well into print media. This can also apply to URL shorteners. Around a year ago The Times starting printing links which one would have been hard pressed to remember.

The likes of tinyurl have been around for a number of years, but it is only with the emergence of Twitter that URL shorteners really come into their own. Other players now include is.gd, url(x) and bit.ly

The focus on this blog post is on bit.ly as I find it the most useful, and as it has recently received coverage from Techcrunch for receiving VC funding.

bit.ly slays the rest of the competition as it allows users to customise URLs , and gives detailed stats on click throughs. The customisation feature is handy as it allows you to stamp your own identity on an otherwise unbranded piece of content, allowing for greater promotional opportunities. In turn, it makes URLs easier to remember for people who are interested in visiting the link at a later time.

One of my own personal tips for using bit.ly for personal branding is to use the service to grab a shortened URL to your Facebook profile, and to customise it with your name. I have done this by linking bit.ly/nicklevine to my Facebook profile. This overcomes the problem of Facebook not adopting the protocols of URLs adopted by most other social networks.

Advertising Supported Media

The strapline for this blog was originally "The Purpose Of All Media Is Deliverance To Advertisers." These words of wisdom were originally passed onto me by an old mentor. However, this was back in the late 90s just prior to the launch of digital television.

The media landscape has changed so much since then that I am not convinced that this phrase rings true anymore.

One of the reasons for this is that what we now classify as media is a lot broader than ten years ago. For example, a stock ticker plugin for Firefox is media in that it is a distributor and carrier of information. However, a number of these do not serve any commercial purpose. Cloud based services now reposition software as media. It is unlikely that decent enterprise packages will base their business model on advertising.

However, the main motivation for this post has been in what the perceived role of advertising is in the future of television and music industries.

Over the last few weeks the traditional advertising supported role of television has been brought into question due to the downturn in the advertising industry. Besides the economic climate, this is due to the proliferation of choice and segmentation of audiences. This started with the emergence of digital television but more recently has been affected by the growing proportion of advertising spend being used online. As I mentioned in a previous post, Google now generates more money than ITV.

It is only now that we are really starting to see the slashing of budgets for programming on commercial broadcasters. Notably, ITV and Channel 4 are really feeling the pinch. Last week Michael Grade announced the slashing of high budget productions and laid off around 600 members of staff.

In really simple terms, the smaller an audience is the less the programme will be able to generate from advertisers. As television has always been referred to as "the blunt instrument," it is nigh on impossible for advertisers to know who they have been reaching. The only way commercial television will be able to compete with the likes of Google is with mass adoption of internet protocol television, with Phorm-like technology for ultra customised targetting.

Another ramification which this has for the future of television is that production companies may well have to look for new sources of funding to produce and commision content.

However, on the flipside we have the music industry. The emergence of the free version of Spotify has resulted in the growing assumption that the future of the music industry could well rely on advertising supported music services. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, that services like Spotify are increasingly making music being thought of as media. In turn, the collapse of one business model within the entertainment industry is being held up as a potential solution for another.

Whilst I believe that one way of monetising the consumption habits of music fans is to subject them to advertising, I am not convinced that this is sustainable. In a recession it is a great way to grow your customer base. However, somewhat paradoxically advertising is one of the first industries that is hit in a recession.

It is widely known that premium subscribers of internet services are a lot more profitable than free customers. It is fine to build your customer base first and monetise later. However, the importance of monetisation is imperative as the traditional IPO exit route is not one that is a viable option in the current climate for entrepneurial startups. Twitter and Facebook are perhaps the best and most often quoted examples of web businesses facing this dilemma.

The upshot of all of the above is that what we now classify as media offers a lot broader scope than the days of yore, and that the way forward is to rely less on advertising. This is likely to be economically viable but it is not yet clear how scaleable this will be.

The Pirate Bay On Trial

On 16 February The Pirate Bay is being taken to court against infringing numerous copyrights. I appreciate that these details are quite sketchy but this is all the information which I could glean from TorrentFreak.

The trial is shaping up to be the biggest case of intellectual copyright being infringed in the entertainment industry since the closure of Napster.

Regardless of whether you believe the mass distribution of information is a case of evolution in culture, or a blatant infringement and exploitation of intellectual property, it is clear that the creative and media industries need to be more resourceful and entrepreneurial in creating new business models. And that's without even mentioning the state of the global economy.



I decided to warm up for the big trial by watching Steal This Film 2, the second part of a part documentary series on BitTorrents.

Ofcom: If the media regulator can't protect its own data what hope is there for the rest of us?

Currently Ofcom is sending waves throughout the blogosphere and national media at large due to the this week's much anticipated Digital Britain report.

Rather than chip in with my own opinion on the green paper I'm here to shed light on Ofcom's incompetence at handling their own data.

After applying for a role at Ofcom late last year, I received an email this morning informing me that I had been rejected. However, the email included the addresses of the hundreds of other applicants who had also been unsuccessful.

Considering Ofcom is a media regulator, this situation is ludicrous. In turn, I take exception to my email being passed on unsolicited to hundreds of other individuals. This creates mass opportunieis for data harvesting.

The phrase "couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery" comes to mind.

Market Research 2.0: Soundout

In the current economic climate, it is inevitable that as budgets get squeezed any sort of investment within the creative industries must increasingly become science-like. As
Peter Drucker once said, "what gets measured gets managed."

Soundout is a new web application developed by Slicethepie which enables labels, publishers, artists and broadcasters to anonymously subject users to their music and receive demographic profiling and consumer insight stats on their recordings.

I think this is a great idea, and an affordable solution for artists big and small. However, one caveat is that market research can sometimes be too clinical and miss out on freak accidents of success and chance.

A well-known example of this is Kenna. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell illustrated how a number of very influential tastemakers tipped the artist for huge commercial success. Initially this did not materialize due to poor feedback from radio airplay research reports. However, artist and tastemaker alike have been vindicated now that Kenna has been nominated for Best Urban Performance in the 2009 Grammy's.


As a music fan I wouldn't be too happy knowing that if everything I listened to had gone through rigorous market research prior to being released. It's somehow fine if this is done organically by Hype Machine but the anonymous aspect of Soundout isn't open enough for me. Music discovery should be about chance and randomness.

Ubetoo - Revenue share platform for unsigned artists.

I'm not sure I can keep up with all these great Swedish music startups. First Spotify, then Soundcloud (technically based in Berlin but populated with lots of Swedish expats), and now Ubetoo.

Ubetoo is a platform which allows unsigned artists to upload music and audio and receive up to 90% of ad revenue from commercials run alongside the content. Whilst YouTube does have a scheme similar to this, it is only open to a smattering of loyal and attention worthy content producers.


This also gets over the criticism of social networking sites exploiting artists for attention but not sharing their enormous ad revenue. At the EconMusic Digital Music Conference back in September, Billy Bragg singled out MySpace and Bebo as two of the most guilty parties.

In order to qualify for the 90% ad revenue share, content producers have to sign up to Stagepool, which is an audition and casting service based in Stockholm and Cologne. Last month the artist with the highest pay out was The Vetter Factory with 158, 23 euros. Not too shabby.


The site also includes a number of widgets to embed channels and content on other social networking sites. However, I'm not too sure these sites would be too happy at Ubetoo piggybacking them to derive significant significant ad revenue.

Open Education

There was a great supplement in The Guardian yesterday, entitled Digital Student.

One article which particularly stood out was on Apple's Itunes U service, allowing for universities to upload lectures for free for users to download. This is something the likes of Stanford and Harvard have been down with for a while now but it was only a couple of months ago that Oxford and Cambridge got on the case too.

Services like Itunes U allow a unique marketing opportunity for globally recognized institutions to build brand equity by spreading their content to every corner of the globe.

Personally, I am a huge fan The Open University's OpenLearn facility. Over the last couple of months I've enrolled in a few maths modules to bring my numeracy skills up to scratch. The platform provides a plethora of subjects and modules for users to sign up to, totally free. It's fascinating to look at the other members enrolled in each module and see how their membership is made up from people mostly outside of the UK. I've also dipped my toe into an Introduction To Computer Science course at Harvard, which can be accessed here.

The future of education is clicks and mortar.

In the current financial climate it is logical to assume that tech investments will be made in startups that have some kind of social benefit. Channel 4's stake in School Of Everything is just one example of this.

Habitat - The First Virtual World?

Great link forwarded to me from Ben Atkins. It seems futurism was alive and well in 1986.



For more information on Habitat point your browser
here

Spotify Applications

As Spotify are doling out more and more invitations to people in my personal network I thought I'd write a little piece of the different applications that are currently available for the music service.

If any readers know of anymore please comment.

Spotify DJ
Brodcast Spotify DJ sets from your computer. Not sure how this one compares to blip.fm

Scrobblify
Scrobble the tracks you play on Spotify via Last.FM/Audioscrobbler

Spotlist
Share and search Spotify playlists.

Spotify Plugins
A work in progress API to create third party Spotify applications.

Spotified
Playlist widget for Facebook, blogs etc. This appears to be down at the moment.

Tack!Tack!Tack! in Sweden this Week

Three new club nights in Sweden and keynotes. The dates will encompass a series of lectures and concerts.

Tack!Tack!Tack! London UK's filter for Swedish music are celebrating their third anniversary by embarking on a tour of Sweden.

Clubs

Thursday
20 Nov 2008


T!T!T! DJs @ Rockcity, Hultsfred (SWE)

Friday
21 Nov 2008


Lacrosse + Hari and Aino) @ V-Dala Nation, Uppsala (SWE)

Saturday
22 Nov 2008


HouseClap @ Debaser, Stockholm

DJ Sets at co-promoted club nights with a selection of T!T!T! booked live acts happen each night.




Keynotes

Thursday
20 Nov 2008

Lecture 1 @ GYRO, Hultsfred



Thursday
20 Nov 2008


T!T!T! Lecture 2 @ University, Hultsfred

Friday
21 Nov 2008


T!T!T! Lecture 3 @ Boomtown, Borlange

Lectures at Music Management Institutes GYRO in Hultsfred and BoomTown in Borlange happen by day

The keynote lectures will present a roadmap of the Swedish music ecosystem, alongside takeaways for how to leverage social media tools to reach an international audience of tastemakers and superfans.

In London? Come along to Last.fm Christmas party in December when T!T!T! play...

Does Fan Labour Exploit or Empower Internet Users?

Nancy Baym, author of Online Fandom and Communications Professor at the University of Kansas has published a new paper, entitled Fan Labor: Exploitation or Empowerment?, researching whether Web 2.0 exploits or empower fans.

The paper uses the Swedish independent music scene as a case study. I was priviliged, as one half of Tack!Tack!Tack!, to be one of those interviewed.

The paper can be read here

The article was picked up by Techdirt here last week, and by Nic Brisbourne's The Equity Kicker, amongst other online news sources.

A big week for music based internet startups

This week both Spotify and Soundcloud come out of beta mode, and open up to the the public at large.

Spotify announced their launch last night with the following video.


Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.



SoundCloud is due to launch on friday. I may as well chuck in their video for good measure too


SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.


Without beating around the bush, both of these are killer applications (both serving very different needs) and point to the future of music websites acting as utilities, with a plethora of content stored centrally as opposed to being on a user's computer.

Brent Hoberman And The Future Of Online Retail

Fantastic interview with Brent Hoberman in The Times today on the future of online retail.

Hoberman predicts the rise of APML (in everything but name), mass customisation and GPS based marketing promotions via SMS.

EconMusic - The Economics Of Digital Music 2008

The different panels during this conference were inadvertently but subtly tied together by “the long tail.” Whilst this wasn’t always referred to explicitly it is impossible to ignore this paradigm of the new economy. This is especially true of the music industry, in which the entire traditional value chain has been brought into question.

Whilst tools like MySpace can be a fantastic way to promote your music to a global audience with very little effort, the artists are not compensated fairly. This point was put across succinctly by Billy Bragg on the Social Media panel in which he berated MySpace for not sharing any of their £800 million per annum advertising revenue with the artists providing content on the site. There is the possibility that until recently MySpace individually viewed the collective content provided by artists as nothing more than fodder in order to attract eyeballs and ultimately provide audiences to advertisers. However, the recent launch of the MySpace Music point of sale platform should align the interests of MySpace and the artists to derive revenue from music sales. The service should prove to be mutually beneficial to labels and MySpace as all of the major labels hold equity in the new venture.

On the same panel Steve Purdham,(CEO,We7 voiced the difficulties between the royalty rates demanded by labels and the reality of revenues derived by his advertising supported streaming audio model. At present Purdham is paying out royalty rates to artists in excess of the revenues which the site is generating. He believes that regulatory changes and label demands will change in the near future to allow We7 to operate as a commercial going concern. Danny Rimer (Partner, Index Ventures) picked up on Purdham’s vision by comparing it to the forward thinking Spencer Hyman (COO, Last.FM), who was able to action a pioneering advertising supported model which has benefited other music related internet startups.

Whether the mobile phone companies are artist friendly is a bit sketchy. On the Mobile Music panel Tom Erskine (Head of Go-to-Market, Nokia Music) sang the praises of the much hyped, and soon to be launched, Nokia Comes With Music. Erskine was insistent that the service is going to be marketed as “premium not freemium.” However, if the service allows subscribers to download as much music as they want then surely this promotes the message of music being a commodity. With Sony Ericsson making noises about launching a similar service, it seems like that that this is one trend that is going to be around for sometime yet. Whilst such services will make music feel like free to consumers it is important to educate consumers through marketing that this isn’t the case.

The Direct-To-Fans panel revealed perhaps the most creative and artist friendly digital music business models. Services like Slicethepie and Sellaband harness the collective intelligence of their userbases to discover and fund unsigned artists. The interests of the artists, consumers and service providers are mutually aligned. Both services are essentially financing models but at the same time can help as being part of an online marketing campaign. The main pros for the artists is that they retain greater control over their recordings and are offered much more favourable terms than by going with a label. David Courtier-Dutton (CEO, Slicethepie) pointed out that the only reason to go with a major over such services would be to have access to their marketing muscle and huge advances.

In summary, the Econmusic Conference provided some lively and lucid debate but very much presented as industry still in transition. At present there appears to be a huge shift in power from the labels and artists into the hands of technology and media companies. The challenge is for artists and labels to monetise content from the plethora of services on offer, and to work in harmony with technology and media companies to create a pioneering new ecosystem where all stakeholders are fairly compensated.

Spotify

After around six months of waiting, I've finally been sent an invitation to beta test Spotify

Numerous people within my network have been evangelizing about this for a while.

The service has only been in my life for just over twelve hours but I'm already convinced that at present it is the best consumer serving on demand streaming music service around.

Whilst similar products, like Songza, Seeqpod and Mixturtle, have been around for a while they sweep the internet for illegal content. Notably Seeqpod had a huge lawsuit brought against them by Warner earlier in the year. However, Spotify are trying to build a legitimate scaleable business so all of the content is licensed. On top of this the interface and execution of the site is clean and seamless, thus providing a superior service.

Providing they can steer clear of lawsuits and backwards thinking labels refusing to cooperate I'm pretty confident Spotify will become the market leader in on demand
streaming audio services.

Channel 4 and ITV could learn a thing or two from Joost

This month Joost announced that they will be launching a web based player to replace their download software client.

I'm amazed that Channel 4 and ITV still haven't got round to doing this. At present ITV's Catch Up service requires the user to download Microsoft Silverlight, whilst Channel 4's 4OD requires users to make a similar installation on their device.

As quite frankly I can't be bothered to do this I watch Channel 4 and ITV content on third-party streaming sites like OV Guide. The upshot of this is that Channel 4 and ITV are losing out on advertising revenue.

All these channels have to do is make it easy for the user. It's not rocket science.

You have to really give it up to the BBC for providing such a fantastic product in the IPlayer. They've set the bar high.

Time will tell whether the launch of Project Kangaroo will reveal whether the other terrestrial channels learn from their mistakes.