by Paula Marttila on February 9, 2010
There’s more to Swedish online music scene than Spotify. While waiting for its big U.S. launch and trying to avoid being jeaulous of the French now signing up for free, there’s other cool stuff from Sweden to discover new music with. On the go. For free.
One of my absolute favourite services to discover new music and keep it fresh is CitySounds.fm. It was developed in only 15 hours by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud at Music Hack Day London. CitySounds.fm lets one discover music produced in cities worldwide, metropolitan or small town, as well as it automatically locates ones current city. It’s based on SoundCloud API, using all the public geotagged music available. Swedish SoundCloud is an online collaboration tool for music professionals to share music and audio files. (Check out Robert Scoble’s interview with SoundCloud co-founder Alexander Ljung to get wowed). Each city is listed by different music genres and one can become a fan of a city by sharing it on both Facebook and Twitter, thus adding social music discovery element to it. To favourite a city helps it also to climb on the popular chart.
New music providers are to be announced, and an update is coming out this week on the web version with enhanced navigation and better tracking of Facebook sharings, also replacing the old board with new one showing the latest updated cities instead. Since December CitySounds.fm is also available on the iPhone at price of $3. It’s already had over 2 000 downloads. A major update on the iPhone app is also in the making, expect it within next two months.
CitySounds.fm attracts today 60 000 monthly visits counting for approx. 150 000 plays.
Music Hack Day Stockholm
Stockholm, Sweden, was also the place to accomodate the latest edition of Music Hack Day after Boston, Amsterdam, Berlin, and London. Together with Mattias Arrelid of Spotify, Henrik Berggren of CitySounds.fm threw a great hacking weekend with Spotify, SoundCloud, Last.fm and Echo Nest among attending companies. 30 cool new music projects were born and I was as impressed as David Noël of SoundCloud and Matthew Ogle of Last.fm. Rumors are circulating having the next hack day either in New York, Barcelona or London.
Few Nice Examples:
My City vs. Your City by Michael Schieben is a pretty neat music discovery app that uses Last.fm data to compare what people listen to in different cities. As one can see, Stockholm and San Francisco may be close when it comes to tech but appararently Lady GaGa is the only thing we seem to agree on when it comes to music.
Songkick On Tour connects ones Songkick and Dopplr accounts to find shows happening in ones city of destination. Never miss a great gig when travelling. Songkick On Tour was created by Matt Biddulph, CTO of Dopplr.
Holodeck by Winston Design is kind of what Mobile Roadie is to iPhone apps, except for websites: With Holodeck an artist can create its own website in no time by pulling data from Last.fm, Songkick, Tumblr and SoundCloud accounts. Very neat. Check out.
All this new music discovery is made possible due to availability of open APIs. Hence, the power of open APIs is substansial when it comes to online innovation, both within product development and business models.
And there doesn’t seem to be any stop to the ever increasing flow and demand of music online. SoundCloud is experiencing 30% monthly growth, having 10 000 hours of audio uploaded every day! Last.fm does 2 million scrobbles per hour, i.e. automatically adds the tracks you play to your Last.fm account, and gets more than 45% of its traffic via 3rd party APIs!
To quote Matthew Ogle, Last.fm: ”It’s pretty clear that 2010 is going to be an exciting year in music and tech.”
Online music scene community truly represents what’s great about the open and social web: The more you open up, the more you share – the more you receive and discover.
More bub.blicio.us reading on music.
Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com
by Stephanie Schlegel on January 4, 2010
Ke$ha, a Los Angeles based singer, moved 610,069 downloads of her first single “Tik Tok” in a week placing her at the number 2 spot for one week downloads ever with Flo Rida’s “Right Round” at number one in one week sales (with Ke$ha as an uncredited singer). That number is remarkably similar to the number of times New Moon was illegally downloaded online during it’s first week of release (610,000). That number pales in comparison to the first week illegal downloads for Avatar which came close to one million illegal downloads.
Illegal online downloads during the theater run doesn’t appear to have much of an impact on the box office numbers, the challenge for the movie industry comes when the films are released to DVD/Blu-Ray. With Netflix and other cost effective (or illegal and free) options for watching movies, it’s become harder and harder to sell DVD/Blu-Ray discs. According to the Wall Street Journal, 2009 was the first year since 2002 that ticket sales out did DVD/Blu-Ray sales, challenging the existing business model of the movie industry. The music industry faced a similar challenge with the appearance of digital downloads but they were able to recover from the disaster that Napster could have been after a little resistance. The did lead to the near death of the compact disc.
The movie industry isn’t quite there. With new release digital movie downloads costing up to the monthly membership at Netflix (and I mean the good membership with 3 movies at a time), what is the movie industry to do in 2010 to turn that around? SmartMoney recently released a list of things not to buy in 2010 and along with newspaper subscriptions, new college text books and CDs was DVDs. Perhaps it’s time the industry lower the cost of a digital download and move the home release date closer to the theatrical release date. This will allow for two money making opportunities for the industry and allow for the movie watcher to choose the type of experience they want and trump the massive amount of illegal downloads. Of course, with Avatar passing $1 billion dollars at the box office, the need for change is not as immediate but as the quality and availability of downloads become a bit easier for the non-techie, that may shift quickly.
We did survive the death of the VHS, I think we can make it through the next shift.
by Stephanie Schlegel on October 25, 2009
On Saturday, I had the fortune of attending and being back stage at the Bridge School Benefit Concert in Mountain View, CA. Before jumping into the concert, I want to share a bit more about the Bridge School and the impact that this benefit has on the students.
The annual concert, now in it’s 23rd year, is the primary source of funding for the Bridge School. The school was founded in 1986 and opened to students in 1987 and my brother, Peter Schlegel, was a member of the inaugural class. Founded by Pegi Young and Jim Forderer, the school was created to meet the needs of kids with severe speech and physical impairments. A group that is marginalized more often than not, the focus on these kids prepares them to lead fulfilling lives.
The concert itself was an amazing musical experience. This year, the show featured Neil Young, No Doubt, Chris Martin (of Coldplay), Jimmy Buffet, Sheryl Crow, Monsters of Folk, Fleet Foxes, Wolfmother and Gavin Rossdale. Adam Sandler is scheduled to perform in place of Jimmy Buffet during the Sunday show. What’s unique about this benefit is that the artists all perform acoustic sets.
No Doubt was by far my favorite performer of the day. Students from the school are seated on the stage behind the artists, which presents a challenge for the musicians, performing for both the kids and the audience at Shoreline Amphitheater. Gwen Stefani and her band were the most successful with that by singing to both the kids and the audience throughout the set. Chris Martin was also amazing. As a solo performer, singing Coldplay songs, he had the unique challenge of using just his voice and a piano to woo the 20,000 or so people in the audience. He did it beautifully and was joined by a violin-playing friend of his after the first song. He was funny, making jokes about his bad choice in hat (which had a “where’s Waldo?” feel) and sharing an incredible musical performance.
Earlier in the evening, Jimmy Buffet took the stage with his happy island music and all had a good time dancing to songs like “Margaritaville”. Sheryl Crow shared an emotional set featuring a lullaby she composed for her son. Monsters of Folk and Fleet Foxes were new bands to me but both impressed the crowd, making the most of the acoustic sets. I was a little late so I missed Wolfmother and Gavin Rossdale but I heard good reviews from the people around me.
This is the one show I look forward to every year. The tickets seem a little pricey but you always get your money worth and it’s all for a good cause. I realize that this post has absolutely nothing to do with social media but is an event that I want to share with the community, especially bay area based people who may be interested in attending next year.
To learn more about the Bridge School, please visit: http://www.bridgeschool.org/
To check out the videos I recorded at the concert head over to my YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/schlegelsteph
by julieblaustein on May 21, 2009
by Julie Blaustein
The SanFran MusicTech Summit at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco this past week was perhaps sprinkled with voodoo magic to ensure all the attendees, logistics and sponsors involved would show up and do their thing. Rather, its success was truly due to the magic of Brian and Shoshana Zisk who oversaw every detail of the conference along with Todd Tate who secured over 20 sponsors (including Bub.blicio.us). Perhaps it was also due to lessons learned as this is their fourth Summit produced in less than two years. Over 600 attendees came together including entrepreneurs, lawyers, activists, artists and musicians seeking to make money and make sense of the rapidly changing world in the music industry. Many in the audience could have easily been one the incredible speakers representing the industry.
The following statement sums up the continued quandary that the music biz finds itself in and continues to face. As stated in January of 2008 in the arstechnica site, “…music isn’t on its deathbed yet; in fact, people are listening to more artists than ever before, on more white earbuds than ever before, in more places than ever before. They’re just not paying as much.” Its the SanFran MusicTech Summit that provides the ideal place for all the players to come together to seek out the solutions.
Laura Evenson, a first time attendee of the Summit and Director of Communications for
ImageSpan, shared with me her thoughts about how inspiring the the conference has been during these tough times.
“With the fragmentation of content and revenues online, everyone is talking about how the costs of current manual licensing and billing processes grow so burdensome that it’s tough to make any money. Despite the uncertainty many people are expressing at this Summit about where the industry is going, the optimism expressed by many others here is infectious. It’s inspiring to see so many people sharing their vision for how to survive the transformation of the music industry, and even thrive as we all move forward.”
The sessions spanned topics ranging from Social Networking Technologies to Improve Monetization, Music Activism, The Future of the Music Industry, Mobile Apps and, oh, so much more. CLE credits were offered along with their program that included an interesting discussion of the future of music licensing on the Internet. According to the official site , the most popular sessions attended were Social Networking & Music, The Future of The Music Industry and Monetization – Idealism in Practice. As I was also taking pictures during the Summit, I noticed there was standing room only in the rooms, indicating additional interest in the many other sessions offered. I even overheard attendees lament that it was hard to pick which session to attend. Networking abounded throughout the day in the hallways, during lunch and at the sponsored breaks that provided coffee, sweets and other vitals to keep folks alert and energized.
There was plenty of Social Media coverage of the Summit including photo coverage by me, Mona the Cocktail Photographer, Ustream who live video streamed the sessions, along with many others. Overall the sessions were lively and full of heated discussions such as during the Social Networking & Music Session when the moderator, Dave Allen of Nemo Design tied his question to a company’s transparency. He appeared to put Geoff Ralston, CEO of LaLa on the spot when he inquired about patents that he had applied for recently. At first it appeared Geoff was not going to be transparent with the audience, but he then elaborated his view in full detail, revealing that it was part of a group of 15 patents that had the DRM title in it that caused the stir.
As usual, the Summit’s grand finale was a packed banquet room full of networking, food and all types of beverages. Food was served, High Flyer poured wine, panty melting Love Potion #9 was offered and positive moods were in abundance. Another great day in San Francisco full of learning, negotiating, partnering, music and lots of new friends for all.
Reaching Fans Session
Social Networking & Music Panel: Ali Partovi of iLike, Chuck Fishman of Cisco and Anthony Batt of Buzz Media
Krystyl Baldwin, Maddie Mat Mat & Laura Wiggins - the gals who kept it all running smoothly
Standing Room Only
Matthew Gonzales Sharing the SanFran MusicTech Experience
Local Music Vibe who power a national network of local music communities
Leon Rogers, Heather Rafter, Sean O'Connel and Brian Zisk
Cocktail Hour has arrives at last!
More pics at Julie B’s Flickr Site
by Brian Solis on April 25, 2009
by Brian Solis
Artists, musicians, and those representing them have access to an unprecedented infrastructure for communicating with influencers, fans, promoting and monetizing art, and also building communities – without the need for traditional labels and publishers.
While there’s much talk about Social Media, specifically Twitter, Ning, Facebook, and Myspace, consider the reality of the rapidly emerging landscape for mobile social networks and the overall platform supported by cell phone users worldwide. It’s only going to grow and eventually expand upwards right into the hot, ultra mobile computing category dominated by netbooks right now.
What’s the hottest phone + mobile Web device right now? You guessed it, the iPhone.
With just over 1 billions apps downloaded, the iPhone represents a huge opportunity for artists to connect with fans while empowering them to act as ambassadors to those with whom the connect with IRL (in real life).
Good friend Paige Craig reached out to let me know about a company he recently invested in, Mobile Roadie. It is a platform for any band or musician to build and manage their own iPhone app, quickly and easily. In minutes, Mobile Roadie provides a powerful connection between artists and fans. The app provides a bridge to sell music, alert fans to about upcoming shows, and communicate directly with them. Plus, the app will help list the final product in Apple’s App Store for fans to download.
The app provides the ability to share music, pictures, videos, albums, and upcoming shows. Artists can stream music and link to iTunes. Fans can connect with each other with the integration of a fan wall. Mobile Roadie also links outside profiles from within the custom application. It also provides stats to help analyze performance and opportunities to improve the design.
Building an app is usually expensive and arduous process. With Mobile Roadie, the distance between you and your iPhone-equipped iPhone brigade is only $399 to start and $29 per month thereafter. More details and answers are on the company’s FAQ page.
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