everyone is a song collector now

Music streaming services don’t excite me.  I don’t care about the size of the library.  Finding songs on iTunes is rarely a problem.  For me, discovery and curation are not problems that need solving.  All my friends play music, and music is played (more so than ever) almost everywhere I go.  I use Shazam to tag songs, and then once a month, I buy them on iTunes.  I have a handful of iPods Shuffles that I stuff with songs to listen to while working out, and I use my Mac to play music around the house.  I doubt my habits are much different than the majority of music listeners?

Music is a collect and control issue for me.  Like a lot of people, I have been collecting songs for years. The time invested in filling my library is far more valuable than the files (the MP3s).  You could take away my music files, but you would have to kill me to delete the last copies of my playlists.

This brings me back to streaming services.  These businesses are far too embryonic and unstable to trust with my song collection.  If I can’t seamlessly move all my playlists from one service to another, then I have no interest in COLLECTING music via a service that could be gone tomorrow.  Moreover, I don’t want to be locked into any one service for the rest of my life. 

Collecting songs is a pain in the ass  (see my process above).  If you want to attract song collectors (everyone), you have to make it easy to collect songs, compare collections (with friends), play collections, move collections (between hardware and services), manage collections, and mix collections (think sex between playlists).

As for all of the other stuff like discovery, tickets, merch, tweets, and photos…yeah that’s all great as long as nobody controls my collection…but me.

Influencer Engagement Marketing – Ten Ways to Find Influencers

This is the first post in a series of posts on Influencer Engagement Marketing.  

Consumers don’t click banner ads, and gazing around advertising and marketing messages has become a universal, learned, online behavior.

Influencer Engagement Marketing
The future of marketing involves creating and then distributing (brand) message-infused, engaging, native content via targeted and motivated influencers and experts.  This process is called Influencer Engagement Marketing (IEM).  IEM is a multi-step process that involves:

1. Finding and understanding the influencers and experts that are most likely to be receptive and have the capacity to re-transmit your message.
2. Infusing your message into something engaging (e.g.: a YouTube video or a slideshow) that can also be easily transmitted and shared natively (the delivery mechanism is ‘native’ to the distribution channel).
3. Transparently and ethically motivating influencers and experts to expend time, energy and attention capital to evaluate, privately critique, publicly review, and to possibly endorse your message, product or service. 
4. Measuring your influencer engagement marketing efforts via web, mobile and social analytics (tools and services).

This post focuses on quick, simple, inexpensive methods that may help you to locate influencers in your geographic area, or within specific niches.

Most of the services below are analyzing and presenting (in a variety of ways) historic and real-time Twitter data.  For finding influencers, the services at the top of the list are  accessible to everyone (Tellagence is TBD).  The sites and services nearer to the bottom of the list seemingly require more effort and investment.   

Listorious (@listorious) enables users to search Twitter users by topic, region or profession, I typically use Listorious to locate people (that have overlapping interests to mine) within a geographic area (example).  Listorious is clean, simple, and easy to use.

Topsy (@topsy) enables lightning-fast, real-time search of the social web.  Sort by links, tweets, photos, videos, experts, and trending topics.  In my opinion, Topsy is the Google of social search.  Finding 'experts' is a snap, and overall Topsy seems positioned to succeed in the social-search / social-analytics space.   

Tellagence (@tellagence) "recognizes a combination of your current advocates and potential advocates in your contextual network who will help you reach the greatest exponential number of people in your network."  I have not tried Tellagence (they seem to be in private beta), however after viewing the 'Tellagence for Twitter' video on YouTube, I can't wait to try this product out.  

Little Bird (@getLittleBird) is a way for anyone to discover influencers by topic. I tried Little Bird during their closed, private beta, and I like the quality of the discovery reports Little Bird generates.  Starting at $50 a month, Little Bird's charges monthly for access to their reports and services.

SocialMention (@socialmention) enables users to enter a keyword and then filter search results by sentiment, source (i.e.: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube), hashtag, users, and related keywords.  You can subscribe to updates to your search results via RSS and email.  SocialMention seemed a bit slow, however the site is useful for finding influencers that have recently mentioned specific keywords.  

Muck Rack (@muckrack) is offered by the same company that created Listorious, Muck Rack is a paid service where you can find journalists ("talking about your company, competitors and industry in real time") based on their up-to-the-minute tweets and social media activity.

Twellow (@twellow) is a useful directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of relevant categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you. Although you can begin looking for Twitter users by category (example), Twellow is one of those sites that appears to need serious design help; moreover the irrelevant advertisements all over the site are distracting.

Peer Index, Kred, and Klout are three sites that are aggregating social network users by offering attractive ('influencer') profile pages, influence scores, and a variety of 'perks' to those that signup using a social login such as Twitter.  On the flip side, if you are a marketer, you can seemingly contact any of of these companies about (paid) influencer engagement campaigns that will enable you to offer promotional 'perks' to selected (via search features) 'influential' users.

Big Data Sources:  Beyond the companies I missed in the list above, there are two other companies worth mentioning: both Gnip and DataSift enable third-parties to tap into massive databases (via APIs) of raw social media data for analysis, reporting, and for presentation and processing within third-party applications.  If you want to 'roll your own' look into Gnip and DataSift.  

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Bruce Warila (brucewarila on Twitter) is the CEO and founder of Spotlight.io.  Spotlight is building a solution that makes Step 3 in the process described above…simple. 

Minimally Viable Bullet Train

Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, wrote a great post on TechCrunch that questions the popular hit-driven, trend of rapidly building inexpensive products that only have the minimum features needed to succeed.  The Lien Startup / Minimally Viable Product thesis advocates failing fast (and often) and iterating quickly based upon customer feedback.

My thoughts on this subject can be summed up in one sentence: 'Sometimes you need to build a nuclear-powered bullet train.'

It seems to me that the narrower the value proposition is, the harder it is to build a minimally viable product.  I am not sure if the following analogy holds up everywhere, but try this:

• If you want to provide reliable ground transportation, you could build a locomotive.
• If you want to provide high-speeed, ground transportation, you need to build a bullet train.
• If you want to provide comfortable, high-speed, ground transportation, you need to build a bullet train with leather seats and beds.
  
• If you want to provide non-stop, nationwide, comfortable, high-speed, ground transportation, you need to build a bullet train with leather seats, beds, and a nuclear reactor.  

A narrow value proposition does not equate to a narrow market opportunity, it's just harder to build.

@brucewarila

The Fusion Reactor of Music Industry Revenue

By the end of the ‘Back To The Future’ trilogy, to travel to any point in time, Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine no longer needed a plutonium power source to generate 1.21 gigawatts of power; instead, the ‘Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor’ powered the DeLorean using ordinary household waste. 

Right now, the music industry’s revenue plutonium is a rare combination of massive exposure, music sales, merch sales, touring revenue, publishing royalties, and brand sponsorships.  

Just over the horizon however, the fusion energy of music industry revenue - powered by the convergence of three Internet mega-trends - is about to arrive.

Here are how the three trends will combine to change the revenue landscape for the music industry:

Influencer Search
Imagine all of your numerous areas of interest, combined with your physical location, as a Rubik’s Cube.  Within some of the cubes (the cubes within the bigger cube), you are the king (influencer); within other cubes, you are a mere plebe.  Now imagine tools (influencer search tools) that enable ANYONE to locate the kings of any cube, by size (social reach), and by location (optional).  Influencer search tools are here to stay, and they are evolving rapidly.  Although a leader in this space has yet to emerge, take a look at: Little Bird, Telegance, Klout, or PierIndex.  And, if you want to weigh some of your ‘cubes’, try KnowYourFollowers.

Native Advertising 
Seth Godin said something like this: “advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better”.  Less then 10% of internet users will click on any display ad during the year.  Not only does advertising barely work, the rates advertisers will pay to place ads have been plummeting for years.  What seems to work far better is advertising that is…not advertising.  ‘Native’ advertising is the practice of wrapping a message with engaging content such as a funny YouTube video, a cookbook application, a photo stream, an app, or a whitepaper.  Brands and promoters are rapidly learning that if they want their message consumed and shared, they have to encapsulate it within something that is not advertising and beyond interesting.  One of my favorite native ads is this one from Southern Comfort. 

Influencer Engagement (Marketing)
If you make a product or sell a service, your wet dream is to have someone popular socially-endorse it in a way that is authentic and deep (versus shallow).  The challenge for a brand is to motivate the influencer to consider the (native) product or service offer, read the instructions, try it (more than once), provide (private) feedback, and then go forward and proclaim genuine love for the brand’s ‘thing’ to his or her legion of friends and followers.  Now where I come from, most influencers are busy people that don’t have time to evaluate every opportunity, product, or service that’s dangled in front of them.  Nope, the only way promoters and marketers are going to obtain (deep) authentic attention from an influencer will be to compensate the influencer for the time it takes to watch the video, read the cookbook, install the app, or read the whitepaper.  Furthermore, if you want a day in the influencer’s social spotlight…well that’s extra ($).  The bottom line: this isn’t advertising: it’s getting paid for your time and attention, combined with paid (or not), transparent, social endorsements (of native ‘stuff’).

= Music Industry Revenue
Influencer Search, Native Advertising, and Influencer Engagement Machinery are coming to ANYONE who wants to promote ANYTHING.  It’s real easy to imagine U2 or Jay-Z getting paid by a national brand to give a new product or service deep, authentic attention prior to socially endorsing the native message or the actual product to millions of fans and followers, but how about lesser-known commodities?  Will a popular regional artist profit from this convergence?  Absolutely. Within local niches, artists are social, style, and trend leaders.  What’s going to be different (from banner advertising for example) is: 1) the capacity for (local) promoters to locate you, 2) to measure your cubes (see above), 3) to engage you (pay you for your time), and 4) to supply you with something native that you can transparently endorse (for a fee or for free) to your valuable niche audience.  Moreover, the promoter retains the possibility of having his or her message go viral.        

The Promotion Side of the Coin
Not only do I see artists benefiting from the revenue-receiving side of the equation I just outlined above, promotion will become a lot simpler when you can easily submit to get your YouTube video or SoundCloud widget featured on HIGHLY targeted websites and blogs; combined with a social endorsement on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.  No more banner ads, and you will be able to reuse (share) the social endorsement as a buy, consume, or share ‘signal’ (as behavior is often influenced by perceptions of popularity within a given reference group).  Moreover I expect you to be able to stack up your endorsements like stairs that will enable you to climb the social exposure pyramid via one prominent endorsement after another.

@brucewarila

The post above is a native advertisement for www.spotlight.io
I am the CEO. Spotlight will launch in 2013.
Spotlight is offering incentives for early adopters that can give us feedback and advice.
For more information, please contact brucewarila @ the email service run by Google.

The Music Discovery Debate

Yesterday, barbs were traded on Hypebot about the value of music discovery.  My head goes directly to asking what's the problem?  What context?  Which user type?

I am memorializing my comments below:

I left this comment below on Kyle's post:

"Like a lot of casual music consumers, I have six analog buttons on my car radio. Depending on the interface, I would happily accept 100 more.  In the context of driving (most of us drive 13,000+miles a year), the (discovery) buttons solve the problem of preventing boredom. In this context, discovery is a great solution.

I think you have to individually examine the predominant situations where we consume music (in the car, at work, at the gym, etc.) and determine 1) what's the problem, and 2) if discovery is a total or partial solution to the problem.

I also think there's a consumption-to-a-need-to-discover graph that is in play here. The more you consume, the more you need to discover. If you listen to music a lot, you need to discover new music; if you listen minimally, you are not compelled to discover (you want familiar).

If you plot each context against this graph, you can quickly determine where music discovery is a killer solution, or not."

I left this comment below on Paul's post:

"If you are building a music service and your value proposition is to enable people to discover new music, then you are probably doomed to be a niche service provider.  Discovery is a low priority for most. 

If you are building a music service and your value proposition is to improve the listening experience via great programming, then you are probably on to something that's a high priority for music consumers. (Songza is on to something.) 

The capacity to OBTAIN great programming (it's subjective, I know) via numerous modes (machine, self, DJs,) has exploded.  You switch modes depending on context (self for the gym, machine at the desk, DJ in the car, etc).  

Other then purpose-driven discovery, discovery is an artifact of 'great programing'.   It's not dead, it's not a lie, it's just not the best problem to solve."

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As for my own discovery methods, I plow through the iTunes charts 2-3 times a year (purpose-driven), and I use Shazam everywhere (everywhere there's great programming).