Myspace music is a fun, easy and free way to create playlists. Yes, there are the familiar flaws in the overall myspace interface, but the music features are getting better, and the fact that myspace has most of the content from major, indie and unsigned Artists, makes it worth exploring as a serious playlist destination. Listening does not require log in (yet) but you must be a member to make a playlist. So dig out that old account and log back in to get started.

ARTIST PROFILES – SURF AND ADD!
The best way to start playlisting is surfing Myspace the way you always have: Profiles. All profiles can now tap into the myspace music player and the player has a “+”button next to most of the songs throughout the site.

The + button next to each song spawns the “add to playlist menu”

The interface is smooth – you can add to an existing playlist or create a playlist on the fly without leaving the player. This is a nice touch and makes playlisting easy on the fly. A feature many of the paid sites don’t have. I keep several playlist as “buckets” to add stuff as I surf the site.
FEB best of myspace
FEB unsigned artists on Myspace

YOUR MUSIC PAGE
To manage your playlists, Myspace Music built out your personal music page as part of your profile. Your music page is the main place to manage your plalylists and set them to public or private.

MYSPACE MUSIC
Myspace Music has its own homepage for editarial content, album premiers, featured playlists, and more. It’s curated nicely, and updates daily. Its a good place to start if your looking for new music to add to your playlist.

Myspace music “bolted” on a standard music service hierarchy on top of the familiar profile structure. You can find Artist’s, Albums and Songs via the myspace music home page.

BROWSING FROM THE ARTIST PROFILE PLAYER

From the Artist player you can also find more that just the featured tracks. Albums, Videos and Playlists are available from the tabs on the bottom of player. The image above shows browsing Jason Derulo’s available albums within his player.
Once you select content from this area, youll leave the artits profile, and again, enter the Myspace Music hierarchy. It’s essentially the same player.

This can sometimes be confusing as you can access the same content in two different players, depending on where you start. Sometimes your not sure if you are on the Artist profile, or the Artist’s page within Myspace Music.

The final verdict is Myspace Music has some nice features and works well once you learn the system. When you swap some of its flaws with the fact its free, its hard to find much to complain about.

Post your playlists here!

Plenty of posts and blogs talk about “transparency” in the music business. How Artist’s need to be in direct connection with their fans. Part of the “Conversation”. It’s all buzzwords until it’s real: My continuing adventure with Devo and Devo Inc.

Watch the message, and contribute to the Devo inc color study now!

I love reading the New Tee Vee blog every day and video is an increasingly important aspect of the music business. Think about it – the majority of music is listened to on a device with a screen! I think I was the only music exec at New Tee Vee Live, but it was worth the trip – although the question “is the tv business going the way of the record business?” and the “we wont make the same mistakes as the music biz” quotes were slightly annoying.

So what are the broader trends and how do they apply to music? Here are a few quotes from some of the speakers, and some of the interesting things I heard during the panels.

Erik Flannigan
EVP of Digital Media,
MTVN Entertainment Group  

Hits are Hits. Eric explained that hit tv shows have big video numbers online, and shows with lower ratings have lower views. It’s a one to one relationship, and he said there seems to be no erosion in the ratings of popular shows by having them streaming online.

“Don’t underestimate the mass of passive”

Great point and a classic quote. People don’t want to spend tons of time looking around to watch what they want on you tube, torrents and other on demands sites. It’s more that programming for the mass doesn’t meet their needs anymore. If possible, most consumers would rather lean back and just get great programming that was relevant to them, instead of having to seek it out.

Now think of the long tail, radio, and music. Applying Eric’s comment to the much hyped long tail I agree its probably not the “solution”. It’s really about better music, engaging artists, and better programming.

Laura Goldberg
General Manager of NFL Online,
National Football League  

The internet turned the niche activity of fantasy football into a main stream pastime, and as a result, grew the audience for the NFL. Laura explained how fantasy football drives demand – now you need to watch all the games! Very clever. The advantage is football is a closed network – to watch all the games in real time you have to pay!

Chuck Seiber
VP Marketing,
Roku  

The Roku video player is an on demand video box with over 50,000 titles. Now they are opening their platform to anyone who wants to make a “channel” on their box. Their install base seems low, but is this a chance for someone to make a new type of music service? Seems like the infrastructure and hardware is in place.

Jason Seiken
SVP, Interactive,
PBS  

Nothing music related here, but I had no idea pbs launched the coolest video sites of all the networks!

http://video.pbs.org/

Gary Cohen
SVP of Marketing and Customer Experience,
Redbox  

Redbox offers kiosks in retails stores that rent dvd’s for a dollar. The talk was that some of the studios were upset about the impact of “substitutionally” of redbox rentals on dvd sales.

Substitution for purchase is something we talk about a lot in the music biz, with you tube, piracy, and streaming services such as myspace. Gary denied those claims, and said redbox did research to show there was less that 1% substitution for purchase (of course they did!)

However I loved his quote – “People who buy, buy, people who rent, rent”

Or as we sometimes say “people who buy buy, people who steal steal”

Great day – see you next year!

VIDEO
Great content, and nice technique for success:
How IKEA’s ‘Easy to Assemble’ Broke 1.9M Views (Without Cheating)

MOBILE
New product idea from the people:
World’s First Multimedia SF Novel on a QR Code T-shirt.
Buy it via ebay!

MUSIC
Devo is Back – I was there!
These guys are still unbeliveable!

“one of the few truly original rock acts of the last 40 years.”

San Jose Mercury news

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2009/11/07/devo-fans-find-satisfaction/?

I participated in a fun panel last Wednesday entitled “Music Power Shift: Artist, Label, Technology, Management” at LOWES Santa Monica for Digital Hollywood 2009.

Digital music panels are no longer the hot and heated arguments between old and new that they used to be! Everyone seems to get along and agree on most of the issues.

I elaborated on three main points throughout the panel and I think most panelist agreed with these main concepts

CONNECTED
They key to 360 rights holders is connecting them effectively. From a fans perspective, all of an Artists projects are connected. You need the best team in each area, and if they can all be on one team, you can generate real results. Data collected from a download of the new single, is used to make touring decisions, and update merch lines. Art from a new shirt in the web store keeps the fans active, and bridges gaps between songs. When they all work together, behind an artist’s vision, the sum is much greater than each piece and it ends a great fan experience. 360 is not just about getting more rights, it’s about the ability to connect them together effectively.

PATIENCE
Make the right decisions, then give them chance to work. Allow new ecosystems need time to develop. Direct to fan campaigns that rely on commerce generate maximum results after the’ve been optimized, and correctly run for a few project cycles. Invest in the time of running things correctly to truly reach your potential. Trent Rezonr’s direct to fan approach and success didn’t happen overnight or begin with that one piece of product everyone wrote about!

CREATIVITY
My closing point was about Artists that are learning to create art 2.0 – this is when a musical artist makes great music and inherently knows how to tell their story, and vision in a multi media art/message – across you tube, iphone aps, twitter etc. When the vision is there, these 2.0 tools and networks become more than communication channels, more than new ways to sell direct. They combine and connect to form true extensions of the music experience. The Artists who truly understand this will drive the exponential evolution of music into completely new forms!

Thanks to the other great panelists!

Christopher Allen, COO, Napster
Michael Spiegelman, Head of Music, Yahoo!
Phil Sandhaus, MemBrain LLC
Jeremy Welt, SVP New Media, Warner Bros Records
Sam Wick, SVP of Monetization and Strategy, MySpace Music
Gary Brotman, Sr. Director, Marketing & Artist Services, Topspin
Kelli Richards, President, The All Access Group,

You saw my post about how cool LIGHTS was at SXSW. Ill let her speak for herself! Follow her @ http://twitter.com/lightsnoise

LIGHTS' VIDEO BLOG 24

Capturing Some important concepts from the discussion, presentations, and panels at DME 2009.

1.) Music in the Background – increasingly music is a background activity (while surfing, while playing video games). Online activity and music fuse into a “new” “combo” state of mind between communication and music. Important to understand this context.

2.) Hard Drives are filling up? Russ Crupnic from NPD floated that some stats may indicate people are loaded up with more music than they can handle on their computers and devices. If Hard drives and devices get full, watch the change in acquisition behavior. I think this was the first i’d heard people discussing the reality of this concept in 2009.

3.) Power of Radio – still massive motivator of top downloads and social net discussion of music. Shows up as top source fro music discovery in many demos. Traditional radios power is a reminder that no matter where you are in digital music, online strategy must take into consideration all media. Online radio’s untapped potential – people like radio as a medium if done right. Explosive growth could be starting.

4.) “It’s a fact of life: If your business model depends on controlling or getting paid for copies of zeros and ones, you may need to look at a new business model” (Jim Griffin).

Increased discussion about charging at the isp level from Jim Griffin (transcript here) , and The Isle of man project.

5.) Sometimes when it comes to music, you just have to get lucky in the studio (Richard Gottehrer, CEO of the orchard digital service, and a songwriter whose hits included “My. Boyfriend’s Back”)

If you twitter search Digital Music East, you’ll get a good sense of what everyone else there was thinking!

Ted Cohen’s intro was brief but accurate, and the presentations were all interesting.

My panel “The State of the Digital Union” was after the first hour intro. The twiiter feed from the audience was streaming behind us, and I made sure to watch it a few times during the panel. Problem was no ATT service at all in the room, so I couldn’t participate later on.

Hyebot posts a recap of the panel and my Metalica example – some liked it some didn’t!

Ill be speaking at the “state of the digital union” panel at Digital Music East next week. The site says “This panel of industry experts will discuss the hot button issues of day, including the debate over digital music pricing, online and mobile music product offerings and business models….”. Thats the agenda – curious to know any topics you’d like to hear discussed?

When it came to the fork in the road for new media vs old, Neil Young went the new way, while keeping the music as good as ever! I cant believe I get to work on his projects, and in some small way, have helped him move into the new world. There’s an amazing guy named Jeff on the new media team who has a great relationship with Neil and has helped Neil use the internet. Now Neil does it all. It started a few years ago with blogging, and now it’s visual. Neil just shows up with new material, and we help him get the word out! Oh yeah – he’s also revolutionizing the auto industry! http://www.lincvolt.com/

This video and new album just showed up at WBR and we cant wait to get it out to you!
Neil Young – Fork In The Road

One of my Favorite “New” Marketing blogs “Big Picture Advertising” featured a great quote from Barry Diller.

Challenge for 2009

“You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising. Social networking advertising is being discounted because there is so much inventory [of available ad spots], and because methods have not yet been found to make it very effective. Will that get figured out? I absolutely believe it will. What form will it take? Absolutely unknown.”

Social media is great for music discovery, community, and a natural buzz amplifier. But BUYING social media advertising has not moved the mark in any accountable way for me – from driving sales to increasign traffic, I havent found anything that is cost effective. It seems being a great band, getting radio airplay, community engagemnt, and touring drive more results through social media than advertising. I’ve bought facebook, myspace, widgets, and more in many differnent ways, and never get the return. Warner Bros Reocrds also gets add inventory in several social network sites as part of our liscensing deals, so I get to play around alot. Maybe Big Picture Advertising will figure out some magic!