bub.blicio.us » Music

Social Media Use in the Entertainment and Music Industries

Julie Blaustein — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:00:20 +0000

Panel with Corey Dennis of Tag Strategic, Chris Saad of Echo and Athena von Oech of Red Magnet Media

The Social Media Club San Francisco’s June event held on Tuesday, June 21st. at Co-Tweet’s HQ in SOMA was all about how Social Media is used in the Entertainment and Music Industries. It was a lively panel consisting of Chriss Saad of Echo’s StreamServer, Athena von Oech of Red Magnet Media, Corey Dennis of Tag Strategic and Jennifer Neely of the A-List Podcast who, as the moderator, kept the conversation flowing and the questions coming.

Case studies in how Social Media used by each of the panelists provided a great understanding of the various ways that its being used. Long are the days when those in the Music Industry were confronted with all this new technology. Rather now, they are using it to empower their age-old mission to reach fans. Now, with the tools of Social Media they are empowered and armed to the hilt to do that.

Athena, who hails from Ning as a Product Manager and helped launch their community product – Your Own Social Network for Anything, continues to advocate the use of a Ning Websites to set up an artist’s fan page in addition to the use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels to help promote them. Linkin Park has over 165,000 members and is an example of a branded community where fans interact with one another and it provides an intimate forum for artist updates, pre-sales and contests and more.

Chris’s Echo’s Stream Server creates sites that are focused on leveraging existing social media communications around the artist and aggregating that content at a destination site. A highly visible and successful tactic is evident in the Lady Gaga site. It enables fans to experience real time the conversations that are taking around her and where she also choose to highlight fans on her site providing a real-life engagement taking place between the artist and the fan. Echo also provides free widgets that enable anyone to take advantage of social media and engagement. Through Badgville, they now work with sites to track their engagement and reward users with badges of honor.

Corey spoke of how she works with the Sound Exchange that collects royalties on the behalf of sound recording copyright owners and then pays them out to the appropriate party and artists. Through Social Media she is now able to find Artists and Super Fans to work with them. She talked of the time when MySpace ruled and how from that time MySpace empowered people to learn HTML and how to Play, not Pay. Pointing out how monetization has always been an issue and continues to be so, she recalled the deal with SnoCap that was supposed to provide revenue to MySpace but ended up flat as no one wanted to push the Pay button.

The audience, a varied group that included those from Salesforce, LiveNation, Viadeo to Social Media consultants and Agency types, had numerous questions. Most centered around the technology and the the tools to reach the fans and the conversation could have continued long after we ended. Go to #SMCSF to learn more about this great discussion that may just be the beginning of more to come. View More Pictures Here:

John Riley, Christel van der Boom and Michael O'Donnel

Julie Laurent and Shannon Bavaro of Viadeo & Aurelia Ammour of iVentures Consulting

Athena von Oech and Todd Tate Do the Shake and Greet

Review: Google Music Beta

Michelle Lentz — Mon, 23 May 2011 21:08:35 +0000

Google unveiled its new cloud-based music streaming service during a keynote presentation at the Google I/O conference in May. The service allows users to upload their song library to Google’s storage servers so that their music can be played through a Web browser or on a compatible Android mobile device. Key to that sentence is upload. Google (and Amazon) have both bypassed licensing songs from the recording industry, preventing the ability to “scan and match” your collection… so if you have a large music library, you might want to wire up on a fast connection.

Initial Thoughts
What I love is simple: Music Beta provides instant access to my iTunes library (and any other music I upload) from any computer, wherever I am (as long as I can connect). What I instantly liked about Music Beta was its seamless and automatic synchronization with iTunes. Not only did it upload my entire iTunes library, it also uploaded my playlists, song ratings and play counts. The free Music Manager app also automatically keeps Music Beta in sync with my iTunes library. On install, Music Manager asks me if it can scan my iTunes player (which is a key difference from Amazon). I keep my iTunes library on a removable SSD drive, and Music Beta linked to the library I had open based on iTunes. Amazon’s uploader, on the other hand, would not recognize my iTunes library on the external drive. I manually pointed it to the drive, but it didn’t upload iTunes specific metadata (play counts, ratings), and didn’t transfer my playlists.

On initial signup, Music Beta offers an array of free songs from several genre categories. I skipped this option, and found it a bit cheesy. This is where Google exposes some “holes” in their strategy… they don’t sell music. Amazon has the upper hand here, because any digital music bought on Amazon is instantly available in your Amazon Cloud Drive, and stored for free. When playing a song in Music Beta, you have an option to “shop” but you’re just sent to a Google search results page for that artist with links to Google shopping. I presume Apple’s cloud-based music locker will have deep integration with the iTunes music store. If Apple has a “scan and match” process (which seems likely since LaLa, the music streaming service it bought last year, had that exact feature), then Music Beta will quickly look old-school.

Hands-On
I’ve been using Music Beta for about a week now. Playback has been extremely smooth, with minimal hiccups. Using Wi-Fi I have been streaming my songs for hours on end with hardly any skipping or pauses. Typical to Google, there are a few user interface quirks that are somewhat frustrating, but with a little use I’m getting used to it. For example, I have a lot of playlists: about 70. I’d like to be able to collapse the “Playlists” folder in the sidebar so I don’t have to scroll the whole list. I’m a “metadata junkie” and love to rate my music so that I can get automatic mixes. I prefer the 1-5 star song rating system in iTunes. Music Beta uses a Pandora-like “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” rating system. These are all my songs, so I’m not going to have too many “thumbs down” in my library. Songs I rated 4 or 5 stars in iTunes automatically gets a “thumbs up” in Music Beta. Another user interface quirk is the actual icons for thumbs up and down. There’s not enough contrast between the up and down thumb, so it’s hard to tell what rating the song has.

I do like the metadata editing capabilities at the song level, something Amazon’s Cloud Player does not have. Music Beta also trumps Amazon with Instant Mixes (similar to iTune’s Genius Mixes), ratings, and play counts. I also haven’t figured out how to edit metadata in Amazon Cloud Player, but editing basic metadata in Google Music is simple.

Music Beta Step By Step

Music Manager
First, to get songs into Music Beta, you have to install Google’s proprietary Music Manager app. Unlike Amazon’s Flash-based app, Music Manager secretly installs itself into the Mac’s System Preferences. It would be nice if the app told us where it was installing. I spent some time looking in the Applications folder for it. Music Manager can upload the entire contents of your iTunes library, the contents of your local music folder, or the contents of specific folders you select. You can configure it to watch your iTunes library (or any selected folder) so that it can stay in sync. There is also an option for uploading at a specified interval, or you can manually initiate an upload at any time. It took about 36 hours to upload my near-3,000 song library (and I’m on a 6mbps upload speed). Music Manager hung up near the end and never showed that it “completed” the upload, however. I also needed to log out and log back in to Music Beta to see my playlists appear. Music Manager is great if you want to mirror your iTunes library. If you prefer a more fine-grained approach to your Music collection, you might find it a bit frustrating — uploading specific songs from multiple folders is not possible. Another big plus is you can access your music during the initial upload… no waiting for a large collection to upload before you start jamming!

Music Manager lets you know that you can begin listening right away… no need to wait for the upload to finish.

Music Manager scanned my iTunes player library and matched compatible songs for the upload.

The Music Manager app installs in the System Preferences on the Mac. From here, you can configure how you want it to handle your library.

Web Player
What I like (and at times dislike) about Google is their approach to user interfaces. The Music Beta web player is stripped of anything non-essential, and is focused on getting you to the business of playing music right away.

On the left side of the UI, there is a library column that lets you choose a specific view of your library on the right: “New and recent”, “Songs”, “Artists”, “Albums”, and “Genre”. The “Songs” view gives you a flat sortable table of all your songs. The “Artists” views shows albums for each artist. When you select an artist, it will show the full discography for that artist — each album cover and a list of the songs.The “Albums” view displays a grid of album covers and titles.

I would like to see a bit more customization, however. I’d like to move the sidebar to the top or the bottom. I’d like to control my filtering options. Music Beta also gives you three auto playlists: “Thumbs Up”, “Recently Added”, and “Free Songs”. Since I skipped the “Free Songs” feature, I’d like to be able to delete that playlist. Also, as I mentioned above, I’d like to organize my own playlists to reduce all the scrolling. I’m on a Macbook Air 11.6 inch screen, so space real estate is a premium… even in Chrome’s full-screen mode.

My favorite feature is the “Instant Mix” playlist that generates an assortment of songs that are similar to one you have selected. It works great. I selected “Sir Duke” and chose “Make Instant Mix” and it created a 25-song playlist with what it deemed to be similar songs (it was good with the matches by selecting Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Earth, Wind & Fire, Curtis Mayfield and Diana Ross among others).

Music Beta also proved to be very good at making sure all my cover art was attached and accurate (with just a few hiccups).

The Web interface is fast and responsive. Google uses some HTML5 trickery to switch out the content when you change views, so you don’t have to wait for the full page to reload when you do something. Simple fade animations that are displayed during interface transitions make it feel like a native application. I miss the “auto cross-fade” of iTunes, but maybe soon we can have that too.

The web player’s interface allows easy access to Albums, Artists and Songs in your library.

Android Music App
To play your Music Beta songs on an Android device (no iOS support yet), you will need to download the Android Music app. On my HTC Thunderbolt I now have two apps named “Music” — Google’s and the default “Music” app provided by HTC. This app will be the default music player in future versions of Android. The Music Beta app has a visually rich user interface and immediately synced to my songs on the cloud drive without hesitation. From the Menu > Settings” screen, you can configure the app. You can choose which Gmail account to sync to, and set caching and streaming settings. A great feature is the app’s ability to download music for offline listening. You can “star” which songs you want to cache so you can have uninterrupted listening.

You can tailor your app experience based on how you hold your phone. Go into portrait orientation and the app operates much like a standard music player. You can scroll through your artists and albums and select a song to play. Rotate the phone into landscape orientation, however, and you will get a Cover Tunes-like interface with all your album covers floating across the screen.

Conclusion

Music Beta is impressive, and interestingly enough, already seems more “mature” than Amazon’s offering. In my opinion, Google can remove the “Beta” moniker already. The Web-based player is smooth and well-engineered. The mobile client support on Android is excellent. Streaming performance and audio quality are both good, however, I do have song hiccups more often than on Amazon’s service.

When compared directly to Amazon’s service, I’m torn. I prefer the ease of use of Google’s service, but I like how easy Amazon makes purchasing and playing. I’ll wait to see what Apple’s service has to offer before swearing “allegiance” — but Google’s Music Beta is the one that Apple has to beat.

I can’t take credit for this amazing review. My good friend, and a music geek, Brandon Carson is the author. All I did was give him access to my beta account. My thanks!

Michelle Lentz is a freelance writer, trainer and instructional designer with a serious need for the latest and greatest gadgets. When she has time, she tries to be a wine blogger, although it may just be an excuse for free wine. She currently lives in Cincinnati but has definite designs on the Bay area.

SoundCloud Opens Up The Sky For Audio Storytelling

Paula Marttila — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:17:04 +0000

SoundCloud, the Berlin-based open platform for audio sharing on the web and mobile devices keeps making noise. During the past six months it’s grown from 1 Million to 2 Million users, having attracted both Snoop Dog and Justin Bieber as customers. To keep up with its fast growth in order to become the leader in audio hosting and sharing, as to establish its US presence and the San Francisco office, it needs more fuel to execute. The rumors of raising new funding ($10 Million) were confirmed today, and we can congratulate Union Square Ventures with Fred Wilson and Index Ventures with Mike Volpi for joining the SoundCloud journey together with its prior investor Doughty Hanson Ventures.

I’ve been a fangirl of Soundcloud since its private beta, and long before Spotify Social came along, SoundCloud had been my home for music discovery. Citysounds.fm is still one of my favourite apps, perfect to discover new music from different cities. And now, with the new updated iPhone app, I finally get access to my SoundCloud favourite tracks list streaming nicely on the background. What. A. Relief.

Something tells me that my perfect world scenario, where I can check-in and discover the best food, music and places recommendations all in one isn’t that far away in the future…

Record Your Tunes, Sounds, Talks And Thoughts On The Fly

While doubling its user base, SoundCloud has also been busy developing its latest feature, The Record Button. With the new updated iPhone app with recording and instant upload and sharing features, SoundCloud makes sure you can easily capture and share any audio where ever you are. Like YouTube is for video. Alexander Ljung, Founder and CEO of SoundCloud, cleverly demoed the app in action at LeWeb’10. (Reminder: Just make sure you always have the latest update not to lose any precious sounds coming your way.)

Not an Apple fangirl or boy? There’s an Android app for you. When the new Mac App Store launched for two day ago, so did the SoundCloud Desktop app for Mac, placing itself as steady number 8 on the top 12 list.

With the Record button on both the desktop and mobile devices, SoundCloud now takes the leap into the space of audio sharing platforms such as Audioboo and Cinch, a service frequently used by Robert Scoble when interviewing people.

API Is The New Marketing and Product Development Model

Besides from being one of my favourite startup entrepreneurs, Eric Wahlforss, Co-founder and CTO of SoundCloud, is also a person I enjoy to listen on stage. I had the pleasure of moderating Eric’s session “SoundCloud’s API Learnings“ at Disruptive Code developer conference back in September. With over 100 third party developer apps, Eric and his team have a deep understanding on how to empower, as the value of being empowered by, third party developers. It’s no co-incidence that Music Hack Day unconferences were started by SoundCloud. If you’re running or building service online, this is the presentation you can NOT afford to pass in order to understand why open API is the future model of marketing, product development and should be part of your core business.

SoundCloud API Learnings

View more presentations from Eric Wahlforss.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She is also a mentor for startups at Seedcamp. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

Trendy Lime’s Holiday Party @ Circa

Julie Blaustein — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 05:28:05 +0000

By Julie Blaustein

Trendy Lime is having their holiday party at Circa on Friday, December 17th. and YOU are invited. This is one holiday party not to be missed! Its Marilyn Monroe inspired theme “Some LIke it Hot” will make for a HOT time.

If your not quite sure what to wear, well here are some sexy ideas to get your wardrobe ready and in the mood. Ladies, consider the black and white colors, lace trims, low cuts, and corsets that were the rage in this film. Red lipstick, long lashes, and tousled hair are a must! “Timeless Glamor” from Oprah.com offers more tips. Gentlemen, you have some choices. The male actors in the film dressed in disguise as women, so if you’re up for some fun, give us your best Marilyn (see pics)! If you’re not so in touch with your 1950′s bombshell side, then toss on a bow tie and classic suit or naval officer attire.

There will be a Gift Exchange so don’t forget bring a gift of minimum $10 value labeled with your name — boys bring gifts for girls, girls bring gifts for boys — and we’ll tell you how to meet your mystery gift giver as the night progresses. There will also be Holiday treats on-site including Belgian Chocolates from Leonidas. Part of the proceeds will go to Children’s Charity. Hurry to get the Early Bird pricing of just $10!

The event is kindly sponsored by the Ukuku Law Group, specializing in structuring early stage start-ups for success.

If you are not a member of Trendy Lime, what are you waiting for? Go to their Facebook Group and Like Trendy Lime and you will instantly be part of a Social Network of 3,000+ professionals in San Francisco/ Bay Area. They are also a Social Media driven producer of JETLAG, an upscale social and networking events around Fashion, Travel, and Technology for trend-setters and world travelers.

SF MusicTech Scores Big

Julie Blaustein — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:31:43 +0000

By Julie Blaustein

Brian and Shoshanna Zisk

The 7th. SF MusicTech Summit came back to town on Monday, December 6th. at the Kabuki Hotel. It was another great gathering of the various players in the music industry who drive its innovation, creativity and growth in this constantly evolving space. Topics discussed and debated included entertainment, product development, wireless and hand held, start ups, legal issues and, so much more. The very first SF MusicTech had maybe 300 people whereas now, there are over 800 attendees and over 27 sponsors! There was barely enough room for all the sponsoring logos to fit on the Sponsor plaque. The team responsible for securing all these sponsorships include the “music gods” Brian Zisk and his lovely wife Shoshana along with their partner-in-crime Todd Tate. They all have a deep history of performing and working in the music industry and are now seeking to keep the music alive through the collaboration of those that are seeking to make music and those that are seeking to make money. I also gained better understanding of what made the SF MusicTech Summit a “must” attend by talking to a few of the sponsors and vendors.

Michael Hobson of HRT

High Resolution Technologies (HRT) would normally have exhibited at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas which is way larger than the Summit, but due to their employer Michael Mercer’s recommendation they chose the SF Music Tech Summit. Not only was HRT the largest sponsor of the show but they spoke on a panel and took the opportunity to announce their new product’s launch, The iStreamer which allows you to deliver high performance digital audio playback directly from an iPad, iPhone or an iPod.

Sonic.net provides Internet connectivity to the technology start ups in the community. This is their 2nd. year being a vendor and a sponsor with the summit. Tiffany Lawson, an Account Manager with Sonic.net was eager to be a part of the Summit in part due to how easy it was to work with Brian Zisk, the Executive Producer. “Zisk was great to communicate with, he is always on the same page and he genuinely cares about making the conference a success for you.”

Gianluca delli Carri of MusiXmatch hails from Italy with corporate offices in London. MusiXmatch provides a way to distribute lyrics. Usually they would attend evnts such as Music Hack Day where they would engage with developers. Based on a partner and a past, colorful attendee Robert Kaye of MuicBrainz, they chose to commit to the event.

Peter Jung of Vocoo

Not to be outdone in terms of going the distance to attend SF MusicTech Summit, Peter Jung, Manager of Vocoo.com that provides your voice over background of the hottest songs for iPhone, Android, PC, YouTube, FB and more, came from Seol, Korea! Based on the recommendation of their PR firm, ICR, they came in the hopes of meeting other companies. In fact, it appears that MusiXmatch is now in talks with Voocoo about providing their expertise in lyrics. That, my friends, is worth the airfare and certainly justifies the ROI of the event to any manager questioning its worthiness to attend.

If you are involved in the music scene in any way, do your self a favor and attend the next SF MusicTech Summit in the spring of 2011 to learn, meet new and old friends and do business. You can’t go wrong.

Go here for more pictures and for Past SF MusicTech Summit Events and check them out on Twitter at #SFMusicTech.

Trendy Lime – The JETLAG Scene

Julie Blaustein — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 17:50:13 +0000

By Julie Blaustein

Photo by Eventvibe, Kevin Osmond

Trendy Lime celebrated its 1st. anniversary Friday night with a special edition of JETLAG in style at the sizzling hot Butterfly in San Francisco.

Butterfly was filled with San Francisco trend-setters, world travelers, and social media fans. There was Travel, Fashion, Music and Socializing along with tasty food. A fashion show, an “Any City” round trip with JetBlue! was raffled off along with cake at midnight to celebrate Trendy Lime’s 1st. Anniversary.

The big JETLAG banner logo was made with 6,000 photos from Trendy Lime events, courtesy of Mesaic. The fashion designers were ANYA and Rockchiq, jewelry was by Sasha Maks Vintage jewelry and the stylists coordinator was Ting Zhuang. More pictures will be at Trendy Lime and follow the buzz at #jetlagTL. The next Trendy Lime event will be on September 29th at Temple and will celebrate the kick-off of Fair Trade month.

High School Sucks: The Musical

Alison Massie — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:47:38 +0000

Finally someone agrees with me! After all of these recent movies and musicals about how fun high school is, I was starting to wonder if it was just me.

Enter High School Sucks: The Musical from Lakeshore Records.

It’s the first feature length film made by and for popular YouTube personalities to be distributed via the internet. Created by YouTube sensations Tim Chantarangsu (TimothyDeLaGhetto) and Pedro Flores (PeeDeeFlow), the duo behind the highly popular Kings of YouTube and Kings Of MySpace videos, the movie is slated for release across multiple paid platforms.

My favorite line is, “Be careful this is high school and everybody sucks.” Check out the clip below!

JETLAG-2 Comes to San Francisco Tonight

Miiko Mentz — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Looking for something to do tonight? Head on over to Atrium in San Francisco for JETLAG-2, an event by Liana Burtsava (@lburtsava), founder and CEO of Trendy Lime, an elite social club for trendsetters and world travelers, and DJ Nader. JETLAG-2 “Where Fashion Meets Travel” will be a night of fashion, music, champagne, cocktails and more. Check it out…

…WHERE FASHION MEETS TRAVEL… Please join San Francisco trendsetters and world travelers for the 2nd edition of JETLAG. Fashion, Travel, Music, all combined in a show to suit the most discerning tastes–at a San Francisco’ exquisite location & architectural miracle, Atrium.
HIGH FASHION “Lionyze” by Lion Got :: Apparel :: Jewelry
Drink Specials: $10 Champagne & Cocktails

First-Class Program:
::Travel Show by Art Gimbel
::Fashion
::Performing live: Sax solo by Brandon McKee
::DJ Nader
::DJ Playdoughboy
::“PlantMyPhone” by Mokugift: bring an old cell-phone, plant a tree and have a chance to win $1,000
::Win a 3-hour Limo ride in a stretch limousine by Abiano
::Producer/ Spokesmodel Meliza Solan

Admission: $5 with RSVP before 10 pm
$10 with RSVP after 10 pm, $15 w/o RSVP

Dress Code: Chic and Elegant!
BRING YOUR BUSINESS CARDS–FOR NETWORKING AND FOR THE RAFFLE

For tickets and more info: JETLAG-2