When I first discovered Turntable.fm last month, I didn’t get a damn bit of work done for 3 hours. After that evening I banned myself from DJing. I’ve since gone back in to the Dubstep room as a fun, serendipitous “radio”, but concluded that 8tracks is a simpler solution for that use case. That said, quite a few people are having a blast with it right now and it is buzzing in New York’s startup scene.

But I scratch my head about the business. It isn’t just the well-known difficulties of the music industry. It is no secret that music is an awesome place to acquire users but a tricky place to make money. But let’s put that aside. Licensing might hurt margins, but there are game money-makers that Turntable can put to work, such as virtual goods/currency, if they can scale.

No, primary question comes down to the fact that it is synchronous, i.e. you experience it live, in real-time with other people. Some call Twitter real-time but really Twitter is an asynchronous, near-real-time experience.

I spent 4 years in the virtual worlds space watching how synchronous experiences can generate incredible engagement, but struggle to scale. Exhibit A: Second Life. Exhibit B: the growth of Zynga (now at 215M monthly actives) versus OMGPOP, which started focusing on synchronous games.

You can grow a synchronous experience if you hit that magic formula and continue to engage users with new content and challenges, like World of Warcraft, but those kinds of extensions for Turntable feel difficult.

Right now, it feels too heavy for radio and too light in game play to attract WoW-size audience and user payments.

Obviously they are just getting going, and I am glad these guys have rebooted Stickybits into something so exciting. But if I could give them two pieces of advice, it would be 1. go get Nabeel Hyatt, who battled with music games at Conduit Labs, as an advisor (if he isn’t already); 2. start thinking about how to create their magic in an asynchronous way.

In the meantime, if you see me in the Dubstep room, chances are I’m heads down in TextMate.

Modern Music Marketing

“The most important thing that an artist can do is to tour, absolutely.  Touring provides the spark that all the other marketing segments need to work off of.”

An interesting quote from Mike King, of the Berklee College of Music, in a video interview on modern music marketing. (via Hypebot)

Amanda Palmer & Twitter

There have also been a lot of articles/posts recently about Amanda Palmer’s monetary success on twitter… some good, some bad, and including a big comment debate on TechDirt.  One of the better posts is from Suzanne Lainson at Brands Plus Music, where she writes about success due to intimacy and the fostering of an “insiders club” to make fans feel special. A half-chewed postcard is not valuable in and of itself, but a memento and memory of a shared moment with a musician you adore… to some that’s priceless.

(btw, her tour manager also weighs in at Hypebot on Amanda’s path to independent success)

These techniques cannot scale the way selling a CD once did, but then I think musicians are reconciling themselves to the reality that no single revenue source will brings in all the dough anymore — they need to cultivate lots of revenue streams across physical and digital music, touring, merchandise, premium offerings, licensing, etc.

In general within the game/virtual world space, I prefer micro-transaction models to subscription because you enable your really enthusiastic fans to give you a larger share of their wallet, rather than capping their spend or expecting people to assign the same value to your service. That’s not how people work. Just look at eBay, which became huge because one person’s junk was another person’s gold. (There are times when subscriptions, or a hybrid, are the best approach, but I’m not going into that here)

Musicians are learning the same thing, innovating new ways (often using technology to make it work) to connect with fans and offering a broad range of value across the full spectrum of “fan type” from casual to intense.

Speaking of Amanda Palmer, I have a hard time getting Ampersand out of my head.

The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting story on the strength (and growth) of live music and merchandise sales.

“A lot of acts are putting out records to promote their tours,” says Michael Gudinski, the managing director of the Frontier Touring Company. “In the old days you used to tour to promote your record.”

Article here