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I’ll admit it: I don’t think about the “future” of music that often. I’ve been listening to a steady rotation of musical soundtracks, country music, and late-90s soft rock ever since late-90s soft rock was current, and while I’ve made the switch from CDs to iTunes, I haven’t been more creative than that. However, the subject keeps bubbling back to the surface with the launch of new platforms like Spotify and Google Music, the rise of mobile applications, and even the changing needs of radio (as discussed at a recent client event I attended hosted by Ford Motor Company). Finally, when this infographic showing 30 years of music sales from Digital Music News was circulated last week, I took note:

There are some quick takeaways on where music sales have been and where they’re headed:

• Never again will any source of music dominate the way CD sales once did. CDs accounted for 95.5% of music sales in 2002 and we’re moving to a model with even more options, not fewer.
• The whole is likely not greater than the sum of its parts. Single sales both digitally and on CDs/vinyl are a significant piece of sales when, in the past, we looked for an entire album. This changes both the sales model AND the approach of artists who no longer need to have 12 songs ready to release new music.
• Cassettes haven’t reached the retro cool point yet. Vinyl sales as full records and singles are making a comeback, but not cassettes.

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Music: the most social concept in the world. We make music together, we play music for others, we enjoy music in groups and we make music before we can even speak. Music crosses cultural boundaries and can become viral in an instant. This is why music fits in, so naturally, to our world of social media.

Let’s check out the current social music consumption landscape:

iTunes rules at music organization. Pandora takes the cake for music discovery. Grooveshark has the gold medal for playlist creation through streaming. Turntable revolutionized the game of social music enjoyment and Indaba has connected social to the music creation process. Nearly two weeks ago, Spotify came to the U.S. and changed the face of social music consumption for good.

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With personalized Internet radio and music platforms becoming more prominent, integrating  social networks have become a key component to online music discovery. Aside from learning  that Robert Scoble and I have similar tastes in music (The Rolling Stones, OutKast, and Madonna  to name a few),  I’ve also deduced that Facebook has the capacity to play a crucial role in users’ online music discovery process.

Courtesy of Musicskins.com

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Lady Gaga is a phenomenon in the world of music and quite frankly, in the world of word-of-mouth marketing. With over 9 million Twitter followers, over 32 million Facebook fans and being recognized as an artist with the most digital singles in RIAA history (20 million sold), it is obvious that all brands can learn a few things from Lady Gaga.

Always acknowledge your fans: Besides lovingly calling her fans “little monsters”, Lady Gaga constantly validates her fans’ love for her music and personality by posting their videos, tweets, comments back to them and showing them that she is paying attention. She even invited a young Canadian fan to perform with her on stage - a video that has garnered over 3.5 million views since being posted a little over a month ago.

Establish partnerships that are an authentic extension of your brand: Lady Gaga is no silly lady at all. She understands in the shifting arena that is the music industry that she has to remain viable through brand partnerships. However, she only takes on partnerships that make sense for her brand, such as her digital camera, printer & glasses with Polaroid, her March cover on Vogue magazine, Vogue’s iPad app of her and her upcoming fashion column with V Magazine. These brand partnerships are believable because Lady Gaga is fully immersed in the fashion and digital worlds.

Content must resonate with fans: However people may feel about Lady Gaga’s music is irrelevant because she does not create content for everyone. She is very clear about who her audience is (ie: those who have been bullied) and creates content specifically speaking to her audience. Her content continues to be eye-catching, over-the-top and show-stopping while her Twitter & Facebook updates are all about her fans, her successes and upcoming projects — a balance that her fans appreciate & love. Her content resonates for her fans because she understands what they want from her & she delivers on it — when your content is strong, its that much easier for your fans to share & discuss it.

Ask for help: As phenomenal as Lady Gaga’s rise to fame continues to be, note that she didn’t get there by herself. She had help - and she was aware enough to recognize that she needed help within the social media space to reach her goals.

As brands continue to grow in the social media space, remaining authentic in fan interactions, brand partnerships, content creation and even self-awareness are solid ways to make true believers out of your fans — the ultimate goal of any word-of-mouth marketing effort.

Mashups are nothing new.  In fact on this very blog we recently provided some historical perspective related specifically to music.  OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way …

In the last few days I’ve come across three really rad examples of people/organizations continuing to embrace the mashup movement.

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Have you ever had one of those moments where you’re walking down the street or driving in your car and the perfect song comes on?  The beat matches your mood, the lyrics apply perfectly to your own life, and you start boppin’ along?  For me, that’s why music is great – because it connects to something in your own life and resonates with your mood, your mindset, the situation – whatever, really.  Those songs become your life’s own soundtrack, and it’s crazy to me that you weren’t always able to listen to the perfect music track at the perfect time.

The concept of setting music to experiences is not very new - before movies and television shows incorporated soundtracks, there were plays, musicals, and operas.  We’ve been setting life experiences to music and vice versa for hundreds of years.   It’s just that now we can control when we bring that concept into our own personal lives at a level that did not quite exist before.  And, in the wonderful way that social media is ultimately an expression of vanity, we can make our every day experiences into art by soundtracking them as if they were movies.

This usually isn’t a unique process.  There are hundreds of thousands of millions of songs in the world, and one of them can usually fit an experience pretty well.  But, what about, for certain situations, where one song just can’t cut it? - When only pieces of certain songs will do?  That, my friends, is the beauty of music mashups.  continue reading

iTunes Ping

iTunes Ping, or Ping, launched this September to so much fanfare that I was reminded of last year’s Google Wave launch. However, like Google Wave iTunes Ping is an interesting concept that is proving difficult to execute.

Ping, not to be confused with the social network manager Ping.fm, is a software-based music oriented social networking service that is deployed and operated by Apple, and allows users to follow and interact with friends and artists. Ping was released as part of iTunes 10 and can only be used on the music player. The service launched in 23 countries and has gained over 1 million members so far.

When Apple chief executive Steve Jobs announced Ping he explained the service as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes…[except that] it is not Facebook. It is not Twitter. It is something else we’ve come up with. It’s all about music.” This is definitely true, and Ping’s list of features includes the ability to see follow friends and artists to see what music they like and what concerts they are going to. Users can also post reviews of music, the songs they’ve purchased, and see custom song and album charts based on their own networks. Artists can also post videos and photos for fans to enjoy as well. According to Apple’s Ping announcement, Ping is based around the idea of social music discovery. Social music discovery is great, and I loving using tools that facilitate it, however I’m not too sure that that’s actually what Ping does.

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The Wilderness Downtown by The Arcade Fire

With each new piece of technology that comes out we inevitably start hearing about the impending “death” of the music industry. First video was supposed to kill the radio star, and then individual MP3s should have wiped out the album as a cohesive unit. File sharing was supposed to put artists and record labels out of business, and music videos were going to lose their pop culture cachet when MTV ceased playing them. And, all of these gloom-and-doom warnings would have been great to prepare us, except that none of it’s come to pass; video didn’t kill the radio star – it just reinvented the whole concept of one.

While the music industry has been notoriously resistant to change, albums, record labels, artist and, most recently, videos have survived thanks to figuring out new ways to reinvent themselves. Music videos changed the way that people related to songs and opened up a whole new way of promoting musicians. Individual MP3s reinvented the way that artists created albums by forcing them to make sure that each song was good enough to stand on its own. And, instead of putting record labels and artists out of business studies have shown that file sharing dramatically increases music consumption, with even illegal downloaders paying to support the artists they like. And now, the music video is surviving in a post-TRL world by reinventing itself through social media.

Since MTV changed its name from Music Television and stopped playing music videos in 2008, artists have repeatedly tried to revive the music video. Lady Gaga tried to popularize videos by creating an extended version for her song, “Telephone.” Beyonce also attempted to popularize them in her “Single Ladies” music video, and she seemed to have some success when it spawned hundreds of amateur versions online. Beyonce’s engagement with her fans was accidental but it worked to popularize the video so that it’s achieved status as a pop culture reference. However, while Beyonce reaped the benefits of social media and user engagement, she did little to actually court it and the format of the music video itself remained largely unchanged.

Enter, The Arcade Fire and the new video/interactive musical experience “The Wilderness Downtown” for their song “We Used to Wait.” The indie darlings clearly understand their fans’ need to engage since “The Wilderness Downtown” is essentially a music video that has been reinvented to include the viewer/participant from the get-go. The HTML5 experience starts with users going go the “The Wilderness Downtown” page on a Google Chrome browser (Google worked on the project with the band and writer/director Chris Milk) and entering your childhood address. Then, if Google Maps has enough footage of your home, you are pulled into a highly personalized multi-browser music video. As The Arcade Fire nostalgically sings about how quickly life changes, a hooded figure (you) is shown running around your childhood neighborhood. During the experience, you’re given the opportunity to write a postcard to your younger self and whatever you write or draw grows branches. Trees pop up out of nowhere and your postcard and neighborhood literally become “the wilderness downtown.” Then, after the movie ends, the experience continues as you can replay your film, share it and your postcard with others, or even respond to other people’s postcards. So far, The Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” is currently at number sixteen on the Billboard music chart and has generated a ton of buzz.

The Arcade Fire’s reinvention of the music video via an interactive social media experience is certainly outside the box and groundbreaking when it comes to the music industry and is a great example of how I believe technology will better allow artists to create a closer and more engaging relationship with their fans. In my opinion, the biggest threat to the music industry is not new technologies or illegal downloads, but rather the industry’s resistance to change and their hesitance toward really owning their digital space. Hopefully The Arcade Fire’s critical and commercial successes in these endeavors will prompt more of the industry to start thinking about using new technologies to engage fans more creatively in the future – if not, then the industry really will become obsolete.