It’s my first summer in Chicago, and so my first chance to experience the legendary Lollapalooza. Having recently come back from Glastonbury in the UK, I wasn’t to be daunted by the size and scale of the site, but really like the way they maximised the time and space of Grant Park by having two stages at either end, so as soon as one band finishes, the next one has already sound checked and can start immediately after. You could simply shuffle around, turn and face the other stage and not break from the music for a moment if you so wished.

Friday began… well, wet. Crystal Castles were my first point of call for some electronic-vocoded-rock, and the only reason I left a good set from them was to go and check Fleet Foxes. I’m glad I did, as they put in a great performances, including acoustic numbers and their popular hit ‘Mykonos’. After grabbing a few friends, we headed to Thievery Corporation, and the rainy Chicago sky couldn’t dampen the electric atmosphere and carnival spirit from them and their guest vocalists, including the gorgeous Lou Lou. Beer next, and then a strange performance on the Vitamin Water stage inspired us to get over to the headliners early for a good spot. Kings of Leon were my choice, having been a big fan for a while now. Their ‘Only By the Night’ album shows so much growth within the band, their sound richening and judging by the sales, reaching more diverse crowds and truly breaking them into ‘worthy festival headliner’ territory. A great performance from the whole band, with Caleb’s voice sounding as amazingly gravely as the studio recordings. Although not the official Lolla afterparty, Smart Bar was hosting Dave Pezzner and Mark Farina as part of OM records’ 15 year anniversary celebrations, and so it was our choice of late night haunt. It was also the cause of my late start on Saturday morning, having overdosed on amazing house music til 4am.

I did arrive just in time for the Arctic Monkeys, and just as they were stepping it up a gear, thrashing through their chart successes and getting the (now dry and humid) crowd jumping around nicely. Andy Butler of Hercules and Love Affair was playing a DJ set in the Perry’s garden area. I’ve always been a fan of theirs, and his musical selection was right on the money, with disco rhythms and lush vocals enlivening my tired feet for a while. More friends and more beer led to a sample of Lykke Li and, being a little unimpressed by her, onto Diplo. Diplo blew us away, with his mix of… well, whatever it is people describe Diplo, Switch, Herve and co. as these days. Bass-heavy Fidget, Ragga, Baile Funk, Classic House and more were all thrown into the melting pot to devastating effect on the crowd. With such an epic set, I was ready to head off for a live act, when Bassnectar stepped up to the decks. Within minutes I was blown away yet again, even with the bar set so high by Diplo, the OM Records artist dealt a mixture of rib-cracking Dubstep, Drum and Bass and House to the audience, who were packed in until the very end. The URB warehouse afterparty provided yet more of the same until the wee small hours for all ages of bass-hungry party people.

Sunday saw the sun finally break through, and then beat down on the (estimated) 150,000 Lollapaloozers. The festival organisers responded by handing out thousands of bottles of free cold water, setting up giant fans spraying a fine mist onto public walkways, and the local fire department spraying a not-so-fine mist into the air near the North stages. Top marks for that, and also for the selection of Chicago food available, of which I sampled Connie’s Pizza and Adobo’s Tacos. A great change from the usual greasy fodder offered at shows, and a nice tip-of-the-hat to such a food-loving city. The morning began with the Kaiser Chiefs, followed by a friend’s recommendation of Dan Deacon. Not knowing what to expect was a good thing, as the 30-or-so-piece party orchestra of tubas, guitars, trombones, bongos, laptops and more was a pleasant surprise! Encouraging party games in the crowd during the set was genius too. After getting down to Vampire Weekend, we stayed in the area for a good place at one of my personal highlights, Snoop Dogg. Playing a lot of material from his first album was unexpected, but fantastic for me, being a long-running fan. Getting down gangsta-style with Bert and Ernie was a highlight too. A outstanding hour or so of MSTRKRFT led us into to the headliners of Jane’s Addiction. Being Perry Farrell’s festival, he has played several times over the years, and fully deserves too. He is a great frontman, and Jane’s put on a superb show, each of the band members being talented in their own right. To see them all perform on their ‘home turf’ (they are actually from LA) was a fantastic finale to a blockbuster of a weekend.

Lee Jarvis.

Feel free to check out some Lollapalooza videos at the Lee Jarvis Youtube channel

All photos (c) Lee Jarvis 2009.

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The music streaming app that is currently taking the UK and Europe by storm is looking to set-up in the US in the very near future. (This may well help create music industry jobs in the USA, so keep checking the Jobs Board!)

Founded by two Swedish entrepreneurs, Spotify has over six million tracks available to stream, and gives users the ability to create, save and share playlists, offering greater interaction and discovery. They are working with US music publishers and labels to evolve a deal to enable them to offer the same service here. Having dealt with many of the key companies regarding European licenses, it’s a very real possibility that they will be operating here soon.

The relatively new start-up (October ’08) is hoping to launch it’s desktop application in the US by the end of this year. However, even greater potential could be reached if they are approved as an iPhone app. The issue there? It could be so good as to make Apple’s iTunes virtually redundant to millions of music consumers.

Spotify derives revenue from a number of audio commercials during playback (current EU advertisers include Nike, Ikea, H&M and more), or a monthly fee for a premium service with no commercials, greater audio quality and extra premium-only content. The monthly fee is currently £9.99 in the UK (approx $15), and word is that the mobile app would only be available to those who subscribe to this.

People are becoming excited about the possibility of a real contender to iTunes, and as a fan of aiding music discovery, I really hope that Spotify will push forward with the licensing deals. They provide a great service, and user word-of-mouth will ensure a global success.

Lee Jarvis.

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Independent artists benefit from a more level playing field; MTV Networks creating opportunities in music.

MTV and Harmonix are to launch the Rock Band Network later this year. The Rock Band Network is a platform that will allow bands to upload their music for review by the Rock Band game creators, and possibly available as part of the game’s store, tapping into the wealth of publicity and revenue created for musicians by the Rock Band brand.

The system was devised in part to help expand the content available to the gamers, something which the limited staff was struggling to find the time to provide. And so recording artists will have the opportunity to add to the 700 tracks already part of the program by taking the stems from their original masters and creating MIDI tracks for each instrument, before sharing it with the Rock Band Network community.

Here is a short video from the people over at Joystiq, explaining the idea and the process.

There’s also a lot more detail at Billboard if you want to get into the bones of it all.

So, exciting times! Yet more ways for independent artists, studios, labels, bands, managers and many more music professionals to create their own successes, and find work in the music industry. Best of luck!

Lee Jarvis.

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So I’ve recently finished reading Quincy Jones’ autobiography. I’ve always known the guy is a legend and that he’s worked on more projects than I could ever dream about, but reading the book has catapulted him even further into legend status in my mind, if that was possible. Within a few pages (or within a few years of his life), he would casually mention performing with Frank Sinatra in Vegas, becoming the first black VP of any record label, scoring the soundtrack for Ironside and hanging out with his pal Steve McQueen.

It got me to thinking, how on earth does one person have so much scope or influence?
What was the key to his incredible success? His determination? Sure that was a factor; he had more than his fair share of troughs along the way and always pushed on through. His passion for music? Possibly; he would be out listening to and writing music while other kids would be throwing a baseball around. But there’s plenty of passionate and determined people out there who either struggle to get by or don’t make it at all. The answer is a bit of both of the above, combined with…. talent.

A huge, unscalable, stratospheric dosage of talent.

“There’s lots of undiscovered talent out there too” I hear you say. Well, yes, but my point is that the different areas are not exclusive. Believe it or not, people often forget about the talent part. Everyone’s worrying about not “Getting a Break” (link) because “it’s who you know” etc. That can also be true in part, I just thought I’d emphasise the fact that you have to hone your skills in the studio along with having to constantly market yourself to your target. It does get infuriating, the amount of artists that develop relationships and reach key industry shakers with their demos only to hand over something weak and uninspiring. As an old college tutor of mine used to say…

“You can’t make Chicken Soup out of Chicken $h!t”.

Refining, improving, and showing the best of yourself should also apply to your Music Jobs profile. Adding your best mp3s, updating your resume, and adding some appropriate photos means that when you are searched or referred by people, you have a stronger chance of a foot in the door, and ultimately, successful connections in the music industry.

Lee Jarvis.

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Here is a great keynote presentation from the Leadership Music Digital Summit, where Mike Masnick of Techdirt shares the details of Trent Reznor’ and Nine Inch Nails’ recent ventures, and how he believes they are pushing the music industry forward.

“That’s great”, I hear you say, “you’re always going on about NIN, but we can’t afford to do this or have as many resources”. Well, Masnick also shares how other musicians are using similar ideas and implementing them in their own careers. It’s not about copying what Reznor thinks, he’s a pioneer and can do things on a grand scale thanks to selling million of albums, concert tickets and merchandise items. But you can learn to think outside the box; detach yourself from the idea that music is a product that you must sell via a record label. Experiment, and think about all the revenue streams, technical possibilities, and other perks and positive impacts that you can generate from your music endeavours.

It’s only 25 minutes, so grab some coffee and check it out…

(original video hosted at Vimeo)

Lee Jarvis.

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To bring everyone up to speed, there has been an ongoing case in Swedish court that the four owners and heads of Peer2Peer (file sharing) site The Pirate Bay were in mass breach of copyright laws, not just within the music industry but also regarding movies and video games. The case has received a lot of attention and also incredible support from torrent and P2P websites and their users. Roger Wallis, who spoke in favour of The Pirate Bay at the trial, received a colossal amount of floral tributes, sent to his wife at their home.

The verdict was announced today, and all four men (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström) received 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000. The prosecutors were aiming for much higher compensation, although their calculations are often very misguided; 10,000 free transfers of your song does not mean you lost 10,000 times the sale price of that record. Do they take into account the people who downloaded a few free tracks and then bought the actual album? I thought not.

Having said that, I am not in favour of people setting up software allowing the public to trade music and other files for free without artists’ consent. Let alone the people who shoot their mouth off, claiming “all music is free” and the like. Yes, all music is probably available for free if you wanted to find it online, but I am in favour of letting the artists (and the copyright owners) make that decision, controlling and profiting from the distribution of their work in some way, be that financially or by building their contact list. As content creators, that is their choice, and one of the reasons I am a huge fan of Creative Commons licenses.

People are using over-stretched analogies such as ‘if you hold the P2P site accountable then you must also prosecute ISPs’. There are also many, many comments across the web from people claiming it is a sad day and that there is no way this should have happened. I’d like to hear them come up with a solution, as to how artists can retain control of their work, be compensated where appropriate, and how they will be able to fund and market future creations and music projects.

You can’t really go and prosecute the millions of end users who take the music and other files. The RIAA have tried and failed more than 35,000 times, receiving nothing but bad press, fueling angst and probably instigating further file sharing. If there was a system in place by the websites to charge the users a subscription fee, then maybe that could work, and they could then reimburse the labels and artists. But they have not chose this route. So, do you hold the P2P sites and owners viable? Maybe. If their business model does not compensate the artist in any way, then I think they should be charged somehow. Governing bodies should aim to control this cause though, rather than react to the aftermath. The P2P sites could avoid legal wranglings themselves by striking up deals with labels, but as they are sworn enemies, how about independent artists? If the artists can register their music with a site and give permission to distribute and share globally then the P2P sites can still aid the discovery and sharing of new music and building of artists careers, which they are so fond of using as their mission statement.

What will the devastating effect be on the music industry? Not much. For a start there will be months of appeals, more uneducated blabberings in the press, and probably more flowers. ‘Pirates’ will continue to vent and despise the major labels and government prosecutors. P2P file sharing is rampant, and as much a part of a schoolkid’s daily life today as dolls, toy cars and baseballs were decades ago – it’s not going to disappear. Major labels will continue to push in this wrong direction instead of focusing their efforts on restructuring their business models, and to get to the route of the problem, that is that they have mistreated musicians and music fans for many years now. Creating value, authenticity and transparency within their brands should be at the top of their agenda, not ‘hire more lawyers’.

Who wins? Neither side. Certainly not the Pirate Bay owners (lend me $905,000 will you, mate?), and not the labels who struggle to recoup a few million bucks when they have just spent the same amount on forcing untalented acts into their hit-machine mould, only to be forgotten by this time next year. There are some people out there who have a collection of thousands of unpurchased songs that they will hardly listen to who think they are on the winning side. Congratulations, you’re very clever.

Who loses? Artists. Artists may move to gigging like crazy in order to subsidise the record sales gap in their revenue compared to previous years. Which is fine if they are able to do so and the people who listen to their music online genuinely like them and willingly support them when they come to town.

So do me (or more accurately, the music industry) a favour. Find a new, upcoming artist / band / rapper / DJ-producer from your iPod collection who is performing in your town this weekend, and go out to see their show / gig / concert. Use the $15 you just saved from purchasing their album… you will then be giving something back to the industry that you ‘care about’ so much. Heck, you may even have a good time. Yo-ho-ho.

Lee Jarvis.

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NIN does it again.

Trent Reznor has a great project called NIN|JA 2009 , giving away a 6 track EP from three different bands (Nine Inch Nails, Jane’s Addiction and Street Sweeper) to help promote their extensive summer ’09 tour.

Any readers of my industry blog know that I’m not just a Nine Inch Nails fan, but a huge supporter of Reznor’s music strategies. Giving your music away in order to raise awareness and generate future revenue, in this case, ticket sales. The idea worked very well for the Ghosts I-IV album last year, where releasing the first volume for free download not only resulted in $1.6m in first week sales (of physical CDs, deluxe boxsets and digital downloads), but also helped contribute to a hugely popular 2008 tour of both South and North America.

Obviously NIN are a globally famous band, but that’s not to say that lesser-known artists can’t use the same idea to help raise awareness. Imagine how impressed any venue booker would be if you could help sell out a show. Not to mention that while you have a captive audience, a well placed and stocked merchandise table will help recoup any ‘losses’ of giving away a free download or two.

Making money because of your music instead of directly from it is a lesson that many artists can learn from.

Lee Jarvis.

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This was the first MET summit, organised by Chicago Booth GSB Students and held at the Harper Center, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who considered it a great success. The summit focused on Media, Entertainment and Technology (there’s the ‘M’, ‘E’ and ‘T’ for those of you paying attention), and featured some well chosen panelists and keynote speakers from a variety of backgrounds. I chose to follow the Social Entertainment and Music panels and will touch on them here as I feel they all shared good advice that you can apply to promotion of your music career / artist management / online marketing / record labels and much more. (note: Part 2 next week will go into the keynote speeches)

Session 1 – Social Entertainment
Cliff Warner, Principal/CEO, Thinkwell Design & Production; Matt Freeman, CEO, Betawave Corporation; Anisha Ahluwalia, Associate Director, Denuo; David Goldberg, CEO, Youbet.com

The panel spoke well about various types of customer engagement in the digital world, touching on the gap between huge scale tools such as Yahoo adverts which can reach millions of consumers but may only return impression figures, and the kind of niche tools that really help you to understand your customers needs when you connect with them in a relaxed state of mind and retain their attention; finding the right combination for your business / career holds the best possibility of engagement and ultimately, success.

With less disposable income and more choice than ever before it is harder to keep customers interest and retain return visits, and any business having strong offline comparables will have to offer something more compelling online. This may be as simple as ‘being able to shop at home in your underwear’, it may mean creating more interesting additional features to support custom, displaying reams of data that could not be processed or viewed physically, or offering real-time updates allowing instant changes to orders / decisions. Nike plus did this well and brought the physical act of running to an online state by offering a community to share advice and support.

We also heard about brands that needed to actually discover what their brands mean before launching into social media, and perhaps when it is unsuitable or just plain weird they are better off partnering other companies or launching a community based on a related but diverted niche of the brand. The panel finished up by suggesting where they see social entertainment moving in the future, and the points raised are something that I agree strongly with and will feature in future blogs, namely ‘mobility’, ‘filtering’ and ‘authenticity’. Customer will want access and entertainment on the go, and products such as the iPhone allow new ways to engage them all the time. They will also want and need ‘filters’, meaning that with more and more content being created and shared online, recommendation and guidance will bring quality to the end user and create a strong appeal. Lastly, authenticity is something that people crave, and with people becoming numb to faceless internet spamming, that means that genuine conversations, a strong offline connection and authentic actions / reactions create trust and loyalty to your brand (company / artist).

Session 2 – Music
Beverly Jackson, Sr. Marketing Manager, The Recording Academy; Jonas Tempel, CEO/Co-founder, Beatport.com; Peter Strand, Founding Partner, The Law Offices of Peter Strand; Brenden Mulligan, President & Director of Business Development, ArtistData

Well, obviously here is my forte, and the very well chosen panelists meant that i could have happily listened to a two hour speech by each of them, but I feel we covered a fair bit of ground in the session. Upon entering the room, there were already postcards advertising the Grammys (3 weeks late?!) and Recording Academy artists on all the seats… hmmm. Speaking of the Grammys, quote of the day goes to Jonas Tempel, who said after seeing the Jonas Brothers and Stevie Wonder performance, “I’m not sure if I was confused or offended”. Jonas and the panel also offered a wealth of knowledge regarding the music industry, mentioning that publishing rights are one revenue stream that should be protected, although I was a bit concerned at how this evolved into ‘illegal downloading is wrong’ and ‘they will get you if you do so’ style comments (maybe because of the watchful eye of the RA representative?). 10 years after the Napster hooplah started I thought there would be less of that.

We did move on, and somewhere that the panelists saw potential growth is in the live music sector. Concert tickets may be high, but people are obviously willing to pay that and even more on ebay and the like, so the demand for shows and discovery of music doesn’t seem to have slowed at all. Best Buy is apparently making shelf space in their stores for low-end musical instruments, obviously as a demand reflex rather than a good-will incentive to encourage young music types.

A variety of music players / widgets / promotion sites were brought up, all available to aid artists’ careers, and the panel agreed that independent artists are in a strong position in this shift in the industry, and also the new interesting ways of artist promotion such as the Prince CD giveaway with the Mail on Sunday in England, himself being a music visionary and now a savvy industry marketer and businessman. I would have loved someone to emphasise that the giveaway almost certainly helped Prince sell out 15 of 21 shows at London’s O2 Arena within the first hour of tickets becoming available.

Something I consider very important and is quite a hot topic recently is the Creative Commons Licensing. I wanted to ask the panel their thoughts, especially as to if this relates to the remix competitions that Beatport offers and to what the Recording Academy thought of the huge popularity and financial success of Nine Inch Nails’ operation with this licensing, but unfortunately we had run out of time.

I thought the discussions such a success and inspiration that I will endeavour to contact the recent panelists and other music industry professionals and report back with some interviews / quotes in the near future.

For more info on each of the panelists and keynote speakers, as well as general MET summit details is at www.metsummit.com, and I strongly suggest that you keep an eye out for next year’s event; if it is carried out as passionately and as smoothly as this year’s then I see it being a great opportunity for young entrepreneurs to enhance their knowledge and a key event to forge interesting relationships with intelligent forward-thinking media companies in 2010.

Lee Jarvis.

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Muxtape was one of the most exciting ‘music 2.0’, forward-thinking companies to emerge in 2008. The website allowed users to upload their own mp3 playlists as virtual ‘mixtapes’, and to listen to other users’ playlists. The site became immensely popular fro day one – with 8,685 users registered in its first day and 97,748 in its first month (stats from Wikipedia). Creator Justin Ouellette explains that the important part of a mixtape, which he tried to preserve on his site, is about discovering new music instead of someone finding music they are already familiar with. He therefore purposefully made the site unable to search for tracks in playlists.

Differing from Napster in the way that users would stream playlists, and then hopefully move on to purchase (with the help of Muxtape links to Amazon) new music, many musicians, consumers, labels and web enthusiasts alike hoped for a bright future for Muxtape. Alas, the RIAA had other ideas, and in August last year the Muxtape homepage displayed the grim message “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA”.

September last year brought a new message, explaining that the site is being re-formatted to create a platform for independent artists to distribute their music. Yesterday, the website appeared in a new ‘preview’ mode, with a selection of artists that Muxtape had asked to trial the new platform. Other bands will be able to sign up themselves in the coming weeks, and users will once again be able to create playlists and share around the web.

Will the new version of Muxtape work? I really hope so. The death of the original version was a real shame, and yet another indicator of major labels and governing bodies failing to realise the potential and future direction of digital music. Fresh start-up companies such as Muxtape are driving the music industry forward, and I am glad they are not letting the previous issues keep them down. It will be interesting to see what emerges of the new site and how users react / interact over the next few weeks. If nothing else, just by visiting the new homepage I have discovered 12 new bands, some of which I really enjoyed listening to, and will be likely to purchase music from them or see them on tour as soon as possible. Oh, wow, look at that…. free streaming = potential future revenue….

Lee Jarvis.

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Well, it’s always been on the cards, but the biggest news of the week is that Apple have finally been able to make iTunes tracks available without the Digital Rights Management that was essentially ‘watermarked’ into all previous tracks.

So you can now buy a tune from iTunes and play it on Microsoft’s Zune player or similar by SanDisk. It really took us until 2009 to get to that stage? The major labels and countless independents have been selling DRM-free tracks via Amazon for about a year, so why did they hold out on Apple?

Steve Jobs announced that EMI were willing to drop DRM back in 2007, but the rest of the majors (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment) have held out for some unknown reason. Actually, the reason is know; it’s because majors have no idea how to move forward in this music evolution. They were unwilling to hand over DRM-free copies to iTunes because of the scale of it’s sales, fearing a loss of control and rampant, escalating piracy. They struggle to keep hold of things like DRM so that people don’t ‘steal their money’.

Here’s a thought. Will Apple’s news make much difference? The people who already buy millions of tracks from iTunes are doing so (mostly) happily and playing them on their millions of iPods and iPhones. As far as they know (or care), DRM has never been an issue. People who have wanted to download DRM-free music for their non-Apple devices have been able to find it fairly easily. Will these settled buyers bother to jump ship? Especially with the new price rises too (more on that later). The infamous Bob Lefsetz thinks the news is very much a non-issue, saying that “the only people who care about DRM don’t pay for music, they just steal it. Otherwise, Amazon would have eclipsed Apple and the Seattle company would own the online music market”.

Is it all too-little too-late?

Lee Jarvis.

Cross-posted at our Music Jobs website in the UK

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