Earlier this month, CBS Radio Interactive’s President David Goodman revealed to Billboard that ”I’ll have to get the figures for Last.fm, but at CBS Radio, about 7% of our audience is now streamed through an iPhone. We’ve had more than 4 million people downloading the app”. That’s a huge amount of market awareness and stickiness.

www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i8c26f2cd61d269b86a96cc04c05b6648

And today we’re reading that perennial underdog Pandora will soon start to see some black. Founder Tim Westergren told Bloomberg that he anticipates Pandora pulling in $40m USD this year - and levitate into profitability for the first time next year. The Panodora iPhone app is currently being downloaded 20,000 times per day right now. That’s a hella lot of new customers. 

www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/pandora-predicts-first-ever-profit-next-year/

The other thing to learn from this is to keep an open mind in regards to your business models and channel strategy. There are three kinds of markets out there: the market you think you’re in, the market you want, and the market you’re actually in.

More Tim here:
www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i9ba0bc99fcd0242ca2490e04eb04af28

The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. Of course they’ll still want to sell their music, but now they’ll embed that relatively valueless product within a matrix of hard-to-copy (and therefore valuable) artwork. People who won’t pay £15 for a CD will pay £150 for the limited edition version with additional artwork, photos, booklet and DVDs. They often already own the music, downloaded—but now they want the art. They’re buying art, and they’re buying it in a new way. That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living. So, as one business folds, several others open up.

www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10784

Signs of Life:

Facebook: Directly monetizing Facebook’s attention stream is still being worked on. The potential is obvious and astronomical. But the takeaway right now is about their adoption curve. When Facebook announced their f8 developer’s platform in May 2007, they claimed 23 million users per month and a signup rate of 100k per day. Today, according to Marc Andreesen, Facebook now has 175 million active users (half of which log on every day) and have well exceeded one million signups per week. It was recently reported that Facebook has just surpassed email as a total percentage of internet traffic. It now brings more users to such notable sites as PerezHilton.com, Dlisted, CafeMom, Evite, Tagged.com, and Twitter than Google does. 

America (and others) have just learned how to use a surprisingly complex technology platform within the span of a few months. This rapid adaptability will come in handy as we’re all forced to become more technological in order to be entertained.

LaLa: Totally decent user experience. Impressive inventory. Searchability is good, pricing model is aggressive and persuasive. Not sure how they’re going to scale up their own revenue over time, but the labels are happy. The one thing they did really right was not try to be iMeem. LaLa feels more like a useful device than a social destination. The iTunes experience is long in the tooth by now - people want more. Apple is vulnerable here.

Last.fm: The engineering team at Last.fm are very sharp and are solving really hard problems right now. Their track record indicates they’re open to sharing the fruits of their labor, so it’s safe to assume their solutions will benefit Music in general. The power of scrobbling can’t be denied. Perhaps not the mega hit that Facebook or even iLike are, but Last.fm provide something much more valuable: referential durability. They have built a potentially pivotal piece of the information backbone that will support the recovery of recorded music. Among the harder problems they’re solving: massively scalable data stores (via hadoop clustering) and more recently misspelled track and artist name reductions. One would imagine Last.fm providing a name and title lookup web service eventually. That would be a game changer. There aren’t many others out there able to both generate a clean taxonomy and provide a platform capable of keeping up with demand. Better data - better for Music.

MySpace Music: Newly relaunched, so to speak. Courtney Holt is no dummy. It’s easy to bash MySpace v1. But that was years ago now - and with some partnerish help from the Google, they’ve radically re-engineered their platform and have made solid improvements with their UE. If tweaked just the right way, MySpace could easily become another major music hang-out destination (along with iMeem and LaLa). No reason they can’t slowly take over most of the market share if they cultivate real music lovers and keep their tech under control. Don’t count these guys out. They are “re-emerging”  …with well over 100 million regular users. Good overview of the new MySpace Music at TechCrunch.

iPod/Blackberry/Android/Nokia: We have a healthy platform ecology here with big money being handed out to those who can best pull the mobile user experience out of the 1950’s. Apple hit this square on. The old guard have reacted surprisingly quickly and with real UE improvements. Android is the next disrupter of course. It will become the real value calibrator for the space. The more customizable and open it remains, the more the rest of the field will have to accommodate to stay competitive. The next big milestone for the non-Apple platforms will be to replicate or exceed the iPod/iTunes experience. Now that music is pretty much DRM free, this becomes a lot easier. Expect to see a lot more people throwing high quality media players into all sorts of devices. More players, more eyeballs, more monetization opportunities.

This comes to us via Hitwise who use a three-way blended methodology for traffic estimates (panel/client, server logs, ISP monitoring). Probably safe to believe this claim.

Two things come to mind about this: 

Where they came from: the whole context of site visitation is changing. Web publishers need to think in terms of their content blending in more seamlessly with other content streams that visitors are involved in when they hit a new site. Apparently this now means Facebook. People aren’t searching to find you, they are pivoting to quickly scrape through your content and work their way back to Facebook. A highly chunked, low friction presentation model is worth considering. The internet as iPhone?

How you reach them: this is a good news / bad news situation. When Google ruled most of your traffic, there were well understood pathways to reach your audience: keyword affinity, CPM rates, auctions, search advertising, etc. But how do you garner Facebook traffic? Bad news: you can’t really do it shotgun style (run-of-site, takeovers, remnant buys). The good news: Facebook seems on their game about opening things up and allowing low friction attention flows between your content and their platform. More good news: they seem to have really good customer segmentation abilities which presumably means more impactful messaging when users finally see your content.

Unclear how this will effect bottom lines in the advertising economy if at all. It certainly complicates how we calculate the net value of display advertising. My hunch is that crossing this threshold is moving us into a “next phase” of increased optimization - one that hopefully spews more cash into the system.

Last.fm Hack Day 2008

My fave is the Perceptron’s Where To Live mashup that tells you where the best place to live is based on the current tour routing of your favorite artists.

Last.fm Hackday 2008 recap

Data Portability

Things blew wide open on the data portability front this year. Google, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace all launched major platform revisions allowing for exchange of information and authentication across their properties. Data Mashups are more abundant and popular as ever. Young companies understand that not having a data exchange play built into your platform now represents a loss of potential value and monetization opportunity. We are at an important inflection point.

Chris Saad gives a great end of the year overview as to where things currently stand in the world of data portability.

Other Links:

Twitter and Google’s Friend Connect

CitySearch welcomes logins with your Facebook credentials

Here’s a Wordle I did from the RSS stream of Syd’s blog aka Jazz Odyssey

Syd Schwartz Wordle

Highlights:

• 5 Lies Indie Musicians Tell Themselves
• Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0 - This was written back in May and almost nothing has changed.
• A list of 5 Unlikely Music Industry Heroes
• 100 Free & Affordable High A Low Tech Music Promotion Tips - It’s ready for an update, but this post remains one of Hypebot’s all time most popular.
• Top 10 Indie Music Marketing Tools.  There are too many new sites and services. These are where you need to spend most of your time.
• 5 Free Music Business eBooks. Not bad at a time when cash is tight.
• Top 10 Reasons Radio Stations Are Bleeding Money. A new post from our resident music philosopher Kyle Bylin.
• 5 Selfish Reasons Every Musician Should Rejoice That Barack Obama Is Our Next President
• The 10 Biggest Deals In Mobile & Digital Music and these are just the beginning…

This being the post Mitnick era the Feds decided rather than shutting down the research they’d help fund it. The CIA’s incubator In-Q-Tel bought into Gorman’s FortusOne for $5.45M in 2007 which helped fund the open source wonder GeoCommons. The site allows you to quickly search, filter and overlay a wide variety of Geographically mapped data sets. Also allows users to upload their own sets too - either privately or sharable by the public.

The GeoCommons system opens up whole new areas of dimensionality to novice users - and shines as the model for the next generation data federation systems cropping up this year on the web.

Gorman gave a great overview at the 2008 Web 2.0 Conference. Turns out FortusOne isn’t particularly revenue driven at the moment (surprise surprise). It’s good to have Big Brother onboard as an equity partner.

• GeoCommons Finder - data browser
• GeoCommons Maker - map data mashup tool
• FortusOne Profile
• Mapufacture / FortusOne merger announcements

My position is: Label branding doesn’t matter to the consumer - until it does. Meaning - if you conduct yourself right, market well, understand your audiences and messaging, attend to the sonic and visual quality of your product, consumers will start to pay attention to your mark. It matters. People do need filters.

Attention label folk: If you can’t market yourselves, how on earth are you able to effectively market your artists? A record label is a promise. It defines an aesthetic standard - a set of assumptions. If you keep your promises your brand builds equity. If you don’t, no one cares about what you have to say - everyone loses (label, artist and consumer).