Music, Marketing, Social Media

This is a guest post from Andrew McMillen.

Look how they shine for you.

Twitter is the social networking flavour of 2009. Though it was launched three years ago and embraced by the tech community, the service’s adoption rate has exploded following a highly-publicised uptake by popular athletes, actors, politicians and musicians. Millions have followed the lives of these public figures, whose daily actions are condensed into 140-character bursts, known as ‘tweets’.

Due to the service’s broadcast nature, anyone who opts to ‘follow’ your tweet-stream will receive your message in their Twitter client of choice. For novice users this is often their Twitter homepage, while several third-party applications for home computers and mobile devices are popular for better micro-managing the service.

H8 U Wolverine.  <3 U Opera Centre.

Though there’s debatable value in knowing what Hugh Jackman (Twitter username: @RealHughJackman) ate for breakfast, Twitter offers musicians the opportunity to connect directly with their fanbase. The system can be used by an emerging artist in the same manner as a massively popular band. Therein lies its beauty: with daily commitment and dedication, an emerging artist can organically grow their audience by engaging with their fans directly.

Of course, it’s very easy to take this opportunity for granted. Spend some time with Twitter; start following some prolific accounts, and you’ll soon receive unsolicited ‘follows’ from unscrupulous dudes who’re pursuing a low-percentage strategy that yields few favourable returns. It’s worse when you witness potentially interesting accounts - like young bands - sabotage themselves by inverting the ideal process. They follow people en masse - and subsequently piss the majority off - before attempting to build their audience.

Here’s some advice if you’re an artist about to start a Twitter account: don’t do that. As with any other social networking site, it’s really easy to tell who’s genuine and who’s full of shit. In this case, compare the signal-to-noise ratio of followers-to-followees: if an account is following far more users than those who have returned the favour, you’re probably best to steer clear until they get their priorities straight.

Instead, start conversations. Respond to every @reply; these are messages directed to a particular user, which appear in a different feed. @replies are Twitter’s lifeblood; without them, the service would be nothing more than several million people simultaneously yelling.

Westpac subtly infiltrates Hip-Hop culture.

Ivy League Records-signed Sydney hip-hop artist Snob Scrilla (@SnobScrilla) is a prolific Twitter user; he regularly interacts with around 2,000 followers. According to Scrilla, Twitter is “ideal for leaking stuff because only the kids that are really paying attention are gonna catch what you’re even doing. It’s cool, ’cause that way I know the ones who are getting the free music are the ones who are gonna appreciate it the most.”

He continues: “I just feel like the very least I can do for people is reciprocate the energy that they give me when they write or chat or tweet or whatever. I do get some people that add me and IM almost every night with hardcore questions that I would think they would get tired of asking. But everybody is different and I try to have time and patience for everyone.”

“I think at some point it will become physically impossible to stay on top of it all - and at that point I’ll have to put a limit on it - but until then I’m pretty committed to the ‘all access, all the time’ attitude and I’m always trying to think of better ways to make myself more accessible, so it looks like it will be this way for a while at least!”

Not The Flaming Lips.

Early on April 21, Sonic Youth (@TheSonicYouth) tweeted a link to a free download of a new song ‘Sacred Trickster’ to their 12,000 followers ahead of their June album release. Hours later, the track had topped online music chart WeAreHunted.com after appearing on dozens of music blogs across the web, as well as being picked up by Triple J.

Let’s step back and think about this for a moment. One of the biggest and most consistent alternative rock bands in the world chose to launch their promo single directly to their attentive audience, who jumped on the track and pushed it into popular consciousness. Within a day. That’s the power of Twitter when used correctly.

Take Amanda Palmer (@AmandaPalmer), a popular solo artist and frontwoman of punk-cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, as another example. Between holding impromptu shows for her followers and offering on-the-spot gig guest list freebies, Palmer regularly uploads photographs from her mobile phone to an image hosting service named Twitpic. These instantaneous glimpses into an artist’s world are valuable to the devoted fan; each photograph that Palmer posts will be viewed thousands of times.

Trent, Trent, Trent… “Get the f*&k out of my shop!”

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor (@Trent_Reznor) is one of the most followed artists on Twitter: his 356,000 fans have established Reznor as one of this generation’s most important cultural tastemakers. This is no understatement: the power to instantaneously communicate directly with 356,000 people via the phone in his pocket is enormous. When considering Reznor’s anti-label, do-it-yourself approach to releasing his music, it becomes apparent that direct artist-fan communication is increasingly important in the hyperconnected world of the modern musician.

Sharing is the key to building any successful musician Twitter account. Promote your work and upcoming shows, sure. But make sure that you become part of the community. Interact. Answer every question.

Do all of this at a comfortable rate; don’t saturate your audience. No more than a handful of broadcast tweets spread across each day, in addition to fielding every @reply directed at you.

This way, you’ll slowly build a network of fans who care what you have to say. A network of fans who, if you engage them intelligently and regularly, will become far more passionate about your cause than a passive MySpace or Facebook fan.

***

Brisbane-based Andrew McMillen writes for several Australian music publications. He can be found on Twitter (@NiteShok) and online at http://andrewmcmillen.com/

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Listed below are the sites I go to every week, without fail.  They’re my go-to sites, my filters, places I know will deliver quality content every time.

They’re my online locals.

I share them with you because if I like them this much, then I figure you might too.  And sharing excellent things is something we should all do more of.

To Be Entertained and Informed

1. Something Changed
2. Brown Cardigan
3. Kripy
4. Taylor McKnight
5. Fascinated
6. Kottke
7. Fimoculous

To Find New Music

1. Hype Machine
2. Passion of the Weiss
3. Tsuradio
4. Gorilla Vs Bear
5. We Are Hunted (obviously)

To Read About Marketing Stuff (if you aren’t into marketing, these won’t be so interesting).

1. Adspace Pioneers
   
2. Mumbrella
3. Seth Godin

If you think there’s a site I will like based upon the above lists, please share it with me in the comments.

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Muckready.

Having sold CD Baby, the music world is sitting back, watching and waiting for his next move.  As I found out, for Derek, the focus and interest now is in I’ve education and project-management (MuckWork).

Given that Radiohead/Trent Reznor both have decades of major label backing behind them there any value to independent musicians in the ‘pay what you want’ experiments?

Oh definitely!  See this great presentation analysis about Nine Inch Nails, here.

There are a lot of great lessons about communicating with your fans directly.  Not being the aloof rock star.

Giving people what they want.  It’s about being considerate.  Showing your fans you trust them and appreciate them.

Unknown artists definitely should adopt this philosophy of making it as easy as possible to share and pass on their music.

Chillin’.

You previously mentioned the impact of the 4HWW - http://sivers.org/tim-ferriss - on your life.  What practical changes did you make in your life as a result of the book?

I’m a pretty odd case, because when The Four Hour Work-Week came out, I was already living it.  So to me it was more like, “Hey! Someone else has done this too!”  But it had some more advice I had never considered.

I loved the “Low Information Diet” idea.  I unsubscribed from all mailing lists.  Finally admitted I didn’t even need to know about the info I got from them.  If it was important, I’d hear it from a friend.

What really blew me away was outsourcing.  I didn’t know it was possible for individuals.  I thought it was just for big massive companies like Dell.  I started handing some projects to outsourcing firms in India with mixed results.  The experience of this is what inspired me to make MuckWork (http://muckwork.com).  It’ll be an outsource firm for musicians.

How do you view mp3 blog aggregators like The Hype Machine and We Are Hunted?  Do you think their net impact is positive or negative?

It’s wonderful! What would be a negative side? It’s helping turn music fans on to new music they’d like.

What are your views on the Topspin Media model of music marketing and distribution?

Ah, sorry I don’t know anything about it.  I keep meaning to take some time to check it out, but haven’t yet.
How have you been applying your commercial side since you sold CD Baby?  Are there any companies in the online space launching now that you think have the potential to explode?

We’re in such a transition time, it’s harder than usual to even guess what’s next.  Personally I’m more interested in the non-technical side of things now.  MuckWork interests me because it’s about organizing real people to help musicians.   Helping get work done, whatever that work may be.

Derek.

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I’ve always admired Amie Street from afar.  I met the guys on the streets of Austin, Texas during SXSW 2008 and still wear my green “Amie St Lives Here” T-Shirt with pride.

Amie St is an online music store that determines songs prices on the basis of demand. The price for a track starts at zero and rises according to increased demand. The maximum price any song will rise to is 98¢.

Founded in 2006 by Brown University seniors Elliott Breece, Elias Roman, and Joshua Boltuch, Amie St generated all kinds of the right interest being lauded by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, having their capital raising led by Jeff Bezos and the gang at Amazon and being invested in by former president of MP3.com, Robin Richards and David Hirsch, from Google’s B2B vertical markets group.

Golden Brown.

I caught up with Joshua Boltuch to get the lowdown on Amie St’s journey to date.

Can you tell me a little about those early days of inspiration, pre-Amazon investment, while you were at Brown.  How have those dreams played out in reality?

Like students across the country we had access to every song we could possibly want, and we could have it all on our computers in the time it took to click download, go to class, and come back to our dorms. It wasn’t as reliable or convenient as iTunes, but we had plenty of time on our hands so the free option made sense even if it meant spending 30 minutes tracking down the album you wanted.

So the question we kept asking ourselves was, ‘with free access to all the music we could ever possibly want, what would get us to spend money on music?’ We quickly saw that the problem had turned into one of choice: with millions of songs to choose from, how do you quickly and easily find new music suited to your tastes? From there the solution seemed clear: create a discovery service that would help people find new music, and help them connect with other music fans – that would be worth paying for.

What’s exciting is that we all believe that our fundamental premise—a first-rate music discovery service is something people want and will pay for—is as true today as it was back then. But…I can say with much humility that we had no clue how big of a challenge we were taking on when we were sitting in our house senior year, dreaming this thing up. On the flip side, I like to think that if we knew then what we know now we probably never would have tried, so it’s better that we were naïve dreamers.

The Amazon Dot Com

How do you see Amie St fitting into the online music retail ecosystem?

I think we have the most inclusive retail model out there. If you never pay for music or if you always pay for music, Amie Street is a really fun and addictive place to discover new music.

For those who don’t want to take out their credit cards, we have tens of thousands of free songs available to download everyday. Plus, customers can earn site credit for more music downloads when they write reviews for songs they like. So members who want to spend time, not money, can actually earn credit to pay for music that isn’t free.

Conversely, customers who want to quickly discover new, up and coming artists don’t have to spend much time to find out what they want. The popular and buzzing music has been filtered for them by the community (particularly the people downloading and recommending the free music) so they can spend two minutes and two dollars and have a great new album on their iPod.

Who do you seek advice from.  Who do you admire in the startup space?

We have a whole host of advisors, formal and informal, family members and industry professionals, who have been fundamental to our business and without whom we would not have gotten anywhere near where we are today.

That said, we rely on advice from our customers more than anyone else. Since we started Amie Street we have always depended on the dialogue with members to help us build and make decisions about every aspect of the site. We consistently do “Voice of Customer Research,” including detailed phone interviews and live user testing for new products and features, which helps ensure we’re not just listening to ourselves or accepted industry wisdom.

What is the best example you have of Amie St’s potential?  A song/an artist/a band…

There are really so many, both from an artist and a fan perspective. For us, to see members become super engaged discovering and recommending new music is just as positive of an indicator as seeing one of the unsigned artists upload their music on Amie Street, start to reach a new and larger audience, and then get signed by a label.

The Walkmen.  Epic band, inconsistent removalists.

What other online music business models do you like ie Hype Machine? Topspin?

We have a lot a respect for eMusic and iTunes as they were pioneers in digital music retail. I use  Hype Machine nearly everyday.

Is Amie St profitable?

Sorry, as a private company we do not publicly disclose our financial position.

What is your traffic and how does it breakup in terms of how users get to you (search/direct etc.)?
Initially the majority of our traffic was referrals from artists pointing their fans to Amie Street, and direct traffic from press and the word of mouth buzz the site was generating. As we have grown our search traffic has really started to grow and become a much more significant source of new visitors.

Have there been any unexpected events/tweaks that have greatly improved traffic/usability.  (No need to mention Dupre/Lonely girl, I’m aware of those).

There really hasn’t been one silver bullet for us. It’s a lot of iterating, measuring results, and then more iterating. Our biggest traffic spikes usually come from new album releases.

Is there anything that is holding back your growth?  What’s the roadblock to Amie St being as well known as iTunes (if indeed that’s ever the plan).

The biggest hurdle has been getting major record labels on Amie Street. We have 1.5 million songs on Amie Street, but currently none of the four majors (EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner) because of our fan-driven pricing structure.

The Amie St Crew.

Do you have any memorable moments on the path to where you are now.  Time you had to pinch yourself to remind yourself it was all real?  Times you thought it might all come to a crashing halt?

There were all of the above, including moments of serious doubt, but that’s when having my co-founders was so crucial because we were all in it together.

The one story that gets a lot of smiles from people happened when we were out in Seattle at Amazon headquarters. We were meeting on one of the top floors of this beautiful old art deco building, in a conference room that has this stunning panoramic view of Seattle, Puget Sound, and the surrounding mountains. It’s the three of us from Amie Street on one side of the conference table, and on the other is Jeff Bezos and his team of executives in their music and corporate development departments.

And there we were! (You also have to know that five of us were currently living and working round the clock in a house in Hicksville, Long Island. Yes, it’s really called Hicksville). So the meeting is going really well, and then, all of a sudden, something catches my eye, and I look out the window and there is an eagle, just hovering right there! I couldn’t believe it! It was too much! Needless to say, Amazon led our Series A round of financing.

Living the Series A Financing Dream

***

Impressive.  Amie St is definitely worth a look.

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This is a guest post from Matt Hickey.

Lick my back.

We’ve known for a while that record labels would rather lose a mile than give music pirates an inch, but now apparently Amazon is in on the game too.

Amazon are an online only (one of the first and biggest) retail outlet for both physical and digital copies of albums (and heaps of other product) so you think they’d know better than to fight alternative online distribution services. Right?

Recently, however, Amazon forced Coda.fm to remove the option of purchasing albums legitimately through the Amazon store after torrents are downloaded.  Essentially, this makes it less streamlined for a consumer to purchase legitimate product, and thus reduces the number of consumers who are likely to do so.

Logo.

Amazon are probably correct in their assumption that most people downloading torrents are unlikely to follow through and purchase the same content legitimately; however, Coda.fm claim responsibility for several hundred Amazon purchases since launching (not bad for a relatively new site) and, regardless of whether consumers actually purchase that same album, removing the link also damages potential traffic to the Amazon (which sells a lot of product beyond digital music. You know, stuff that can’t be torrented).

Can I download the Amazon on to my Ext.HD?

Yes, that’s corret - Amazon are actually making the process of obtaining and buying product from their own store more obtuse. Instead of clicking a link that’s presented to them, a consumer now has to consciously decide to go to Amazon, start a new tab, open Amazon and then search for that product. As a consumer, especially one who enjoys downloading music, which is the more likely path that will result in legitimate purchasing? It’s not hard to do good internets, guys - it’s about making it easier and faster for the consumer.

Pls?

Why are Amazon reacting this way? Presumably this is because they don’t want to recognise or validate torrent sites that suck initial business away from legitimate outlets such as themselves. Fair enough that they would be annoyed, however, Coda.fm is still online despite this debacle and so is likely still sucking that same initial business away - the only thing that’s changed is the decreased chances of Amazon scoring secondary business or directing traffic to their site. Have they damaged Coda.fm in the process? Is it a kamikaze mission? It’s unlikely that any damage this has caused Coda.fm will offset the loss of potential traffic and customers to Amazon. Not to mention the coverage this is starting to get the Coda.fm, it’s likely that this is going to drive further traffic there whilst continuing to demarcate themselves on the side of the industry dinosaurs they were once so far ahead of.

That’s a big mp3 player you’re holding Sir…

In summary: Coda.fm = unchanged, bar removed links to Amazon (ie. unlikely to be significantly effected); Amazon = lost traffic and coverage whilst gaining nothing and imposing minimal damage on the competition.

Amazon’s Music Marketing Department.

Congratulations.

***

Nick’s View: While I agree with Matt’s sentiment, I can’t help but think Amazon had no choice in the matter.  The risk to Amazon of coming across as lenient on piracy is too high and the potential value of Coda.FM sales too low.  There’s a commercial imperative at work here, one which would seem to me to be unavoidable.

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Fantasy + Footy

On a trip to Melbourne early this year, Ned from Electrorash told me about FanFooty –  an Australian Rules Fantasy Football site pulling in extraordinary traffic.

Intrigued, I tracked down Paul Montgomery - the site’s founder - to find out how a one-man-band managed to pull in 2.67 million page views on 65,000 unique in the first week of the 2009 AFL season.

Paul Montgomery

Why do you think Fan Footy has worked?

I have always believed in the power of hard work, though of course you have to be lucky. I believe that to have a successful business, use a time machine and start one five years ago. We’re in our fourth full year of FanFooty, and we’re just about to hit tipping point, without ever having done advertising or aligning ourselves with a major media property. The traffic has come in part from SEO, of course, but also word of mouth.

On the SEO side, I found quickly that it was very easy to rank highly in Google for players’ names, because there weren’t many pages about individual football players out there on the Net, especially three or four years ago. That has been the major source of Google traffic. I have never managed to rank on the first page for the most-trafficked keyword in the sector - “afl dream team” - but the long tail of player names has driven a lot of clickthroughs anyway.

On the word of mouth side, I just think it’s a good product that fills a niche.  The vast majority of FanFooty traffic comes from the live scoring pages, and they are popular because (a) they provide info that the official AFL site does not, like injuries, reports, matchups, who’s running hot or cold etc, and (b) the site is built for low-bandwidth Internet connections, meaning that people on dialup and people with bandwidth caps love FanFooty because it is fast and doesn’t hurt their cap with a lot of useless graphical junk.

Refereeing Fantasy.

How did you come up with the FanFooty concept?

I have a few online friends who are American, and in 2004 they included me in one of their NFL fantasy leagues, which sucked me in with all of the statsitcis and analysis that the US media provides, and I ended up winning the league on the last Sunday of the season with a touchdown in the last quarter. That hooked me for life!

So I looked around the Australian industry and saw we were years an years behind the American experience and set out FanFooty as one of the companies that would build the Australian fantasy football scene to somewhere near the level of maturity that the US has seen.

What is the grand plan for Fan Footy?

It has been a long journey, but I can see a position now where my traffic is rivalling that of bigger sites, thus they are going to take notice of me and provide possible exits. For instance, FanFooty’s traffic for the week just gone was larger in page views than the official AFL Dream Team site… something I never thought would happen. The other major growth area is in expanding outside fantasys to provide a full statistical live scoring facility with not just fantasy scores but also a bunch of other “exotic” statistics and other things I’ve got in mind.

However, there are political obstacles to doing this without being backed by a major media partner, and may not be possible anyway due to the exclusive Telstra deal that is limiting so much AFL Internet content - and, incidentally, has allowed FanFooty oxygen to grow because I have been outside the process for so long and don’t play by their rules.

FanFooty caught biggers sites with their pants down.

Could you see this working for other sports? Do you consider other fan leagues as competitors?

I can see the FanFooty model working for other sports, especially rugby league, but historically the audience for non-AFL fantasy competitions has been almost negligible in comparison. Last time I looked, the official AFL Dream Team competition had ten times the registrations of the NRL Dream Team. This may have changed this year, but I’ve been flat out managing the AFL end so haven’t had a chance to expand.

I don’t see other fantasy leagues as competitors. I ran my own competition last year called Lethal League, with just on $5000 of prizemoney that came out of my own pocket, but I had to drop that in 2009 after talks with a corporate partner fell through. FanFooty has alwasy been about supporting other competitions, in fact, providing auxiliary services to make Dream Team and Super Coach better experiences for the fantasy coach.

FanFooty’s a winner.

***

Speaking to Paul backs up something I’ve believed for a long time - online sports content in Australia has a long way to grow.  Telstra’s stranglehold means that a lot of nimble hands are tied, but it’s only a matter of time before sports fans start demanding better.

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Almost a month since my last post.

The absence has been entirely due to the launch of We Are Hunted.

The site concept came about from a discussion Ben and I had early in 2008 and became a reality when we met Stephen Phillips from Wotnews.

Ben and I fleshed out the concept, came up with a name and designed the front end while Stephen and the Wotnews team took over with the development of the site and the customisation of their semantic search platform.

When finally on April 17 we officially sent the site live - I went straight to Wired, Mashable and TechCrunch.  To my amazement, all three sites covered the site’s launch and with that, we were off.  More than 100,000 people came to the site in that first week.

Traffic spike.

The flood of traffic was exciting, but it was the genuine affection people had for the site that has us most pleased.

<3UWAH

We’ve been in contact with record labels, VCs and a bunch of smart digital people from around the world.  We’ve spoken to Idolator, AFR, the Economist, NME, AdAge, MusicAlly and Billboard about the site and every day new interest and new offers come in.

There have been different highlights along the way for all of us.

My personal highlight was this Tumblr post from Fred Wilson.  I’ve admired Fred for a while now and it was very humbling to hear he was enjoying something I helped create.  I had a similar feeling after the 37 Signals guys covered what we did.  Having been a huge 37 Signals fan (and Highrise user) for a while now, it was a massive thrill to get their stamp of approval.

Traffic spike.

The plan now, of course, is to make a sustainable business from the site.  Monetising the site’s traffic is a priority of course, but if we are to make it truly successful, that success will come from us being a data business.  We are seeing some amazing stuff come through the system each day, things that surprise and intrigue us so we’re confident there’ll be a market for people wanting to know what is really being discussed, shared and recommended online.

This chart guarantees us business success.

Working with Wotnews has been incredible.  They have one of the world’s smartest, fastest webdev teams.  I learnt very quickly to stand back and let them work their magic.  The more I left them to be creative, the better the site got.  My original concept has come a long way since it was a scribble in my notebook and it’s in large part to the work of the Wotnews team.

Credit also to the team at Josephmark.  The extraordinary design brain of Jess Huddart and Ben’s creative direction combined to come up with an amazing brand and feel for the site which was at the core of why people like We Are Hunted.

And of course, we should acknowledge some of the inspirations for the site: Bill Tikos at The Cool Hunter, Taylor, Anthony, Hype Machine, TsuRadio, Monocle, Kottke, Fimoculous and Kanye.

T.hanks

The whole process has given us a lot of belief in the things we say and do in the online space.

It feels like the start of something big.

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Music. (Photo via Justin Ward and livemusicblog.com)

I was talking to someone a few hundred times smarter than me about Seth Godin.  Let’s call this someone ‘Jim’.

Now, I’m a Seth Godin fan, no two ways about it.  Jim’s a fan too, but he thought maybe things weren’t as clear as Seth was making out, especially when it comes to music.  See for example here and here.

So I decided to get answers.  Below is my facilitated discussion.  In bold is Seth’s original comment, then Jim’s counterpoint and Seth’s reply to the counterpoint in italics.

Seth

Seth Godin: “People don’t listen to companies, they listen to people.”

Jim: “Clearly some people do still listen somewhere/sometimes/somewhat to some companies so if you’re running one you should still try to get your message out there in a traditional way while simultaneously trying to breed word of mouth.

Seth Godin: “We listen to companies when we think they “are” a person. That’s a circular argument, but I mean that we think of Apple as a person, for example, or we used to think of Starbucks that way. If I ran a boring company like GM, I’d work as hard and as fast as I could to be personal.

Not ‘Jim’.

Seth Godin: “People care very much about who is sitting next to them at the concert”.

Jim: What about people for whom music is a disposable commodity?  They’ll love a song, buy the ringtone, chuck it on the iPod and then a month later forget about it.  They go to shows just to hear the hit song but won’t care who is there and won’t have their identity tied up in the type of music they listen to.
Tribalism might work for The Grateful Dead, but they are at the extreme.  How does this model work for a band like Matchbox 20?

Seth Godin: Hey, if the other people with Matchbox 20 ringtones and at the concerts were 50-year-old geezers, you can bet that I’d stop buying their ringtones.

Not the facilitated discussion.

Seth Godin: “It’s not about, anymore, how many people can you reach. Super Bowl, doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant.”

Jim: Springsteen had the #1 album in America after a Superbowl appearance.  How can you say that Superbowl/reaching the most people possible is irrelevant to music?

Seth: The #1 album in America is irrelevant. That’s like saying that the best way to be a millionaire is to have a million dollars. It’s an artefact of a different generation, not a scalable business model. In a long tail universe, the challenge isn’t to somehow get picked by Clearchannel, it’s to own your own channel.

Jim: Given that the artist is the avatar of the fan and not vice versa, can a fan’s (or group of fans) input really improve the quality and sales of an artist’s music in the medium term?

Great art is not created by committee and by extension, not created by the wisdom of crowds.  Fans would have told Paul Simon he was nuts if he’d asked whether he should go and make an album with a bunch of South Africans.

Do you agree?

Seth: I TOTALLY agree with this. Violently agree with it.  Art is art.

And then peace reigned again.

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Through a friend of a friend I got some feedback on my first interview with Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin suggesting that it was a little ‘lite and fluffy’.

True enough.

No-one thinks my interviews are insightful.

The feedback also yearned for Anthony discuss the impact of the Hype Machine on the way people find and listen to music.  There’s an argument to be made that the Hype Machine has turned the mp3 into something people horde for the sake of hording which means that rather than truly enjoying it and savouring it as the artist might have wished/intended, they just collect as much as they can.

I don’t agree with that argument but I thought I’d leave it to Anthony to respond.

Anthony’s Response:

I don’t think Hype Machine is as important of a force behind these changes as people make out.  A similar set of comments were once published at Pretty Much Amazing.  They have it wrong though I do like that they referenced a Guardian article that also has it wrong to back it all up.

The issues with collecting files have been around long before us and are central to the whole issue of music on the web.

In a bunch of ways, it is the currency, it’s what makes listening possible.  We can’t make this reality go away.  That said, we focus as little on files as possible given our project.

You probably noticed that we don’t show bit rates, file sizes, lengths, and other pieces of data that many search-like tools have.

This is all very intentional, and the idea is to emphasize the context of why these tracks were posted.  This is also why we switched our format to include an image and a bit of text from the original post.

At the time a bunch of users hated the change and said that they’ll go listen to music on imeem instead (that’s fine and I hope they went and did it, we don’t want them).

We want to get more people discovering blogs, more people becoming aware that music blogs exist and why they matter.  If we were thinking differently, the Hype Machine would have been a raw file index of the tracks people posted with nothing else.

We probably did play a role in the growth and attention that music blogs have received.  This changes the dynamics of many things, as bigger audiences tempt the wrong people to do the wrong things (post link bait, poor quality content but in large quantity etc).

This is why we also manually approve blogs.  I think even though the space is changing, it is possible to preserve the things that got me into it in the first place - the geniune excitement that still drives a ton of the music blog posts out there.

Word.

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