As you've probably already seen and heard everywhere, Radiohead did something really special with their new album In Rainbows. Free of a record contract, Radiohead released their album themselves. And, in a paradigm-shifting move, they let consumers choose what to pay for the album. If you wanted it for free, you got it. If you thought it was worth $50, you could pay that much for it. Success! The world has been turned on its head.

Or has it?

2nd behind only huge acts at the Rolling Stones/Madonna/Beatles level, Radiohead is probably the most popular band in the world. As such, they're loaded. They have more cash than Davy Crockett. They've also been professional musicians since, well, forever. They've toured around the globe dozens of times and recorded 10+ albums. They have a rabid fan base full of devoted listeners who trade bootleg recordings across the internet.

And it's awesome that a band of this caliber is free and open to essentially flip the bird to the RIAA. Everyone is happy. Let us all rejoice!

Not so fast everyone.

Let me introduce you to a little band called The Gossip. (I had to link to their MySpace cause they don't even have a official site yet.) They used to rock the Seattle music scene, but now live in Portland. In a recent article in New York Times Magazine, Rick Ruben mentions that this is the first new artist signed to Columbia (his new employer) that he's excited about. I love them. Everyone I've introduced them to loves them. Long story short, they're on the cusp of hitting the big time. And like Radiohead, I'd have no problem paying $20 for their album.

And yet despite teetering on the edge of success, the "Radiohead model" of music sales - release it for free and use the music as fuel to power money making machine of live performances and merch - will not work for the Gossip.

In order to distribute your music online you need a huge capital investment. That money goes towards recording and producing an album, encoding it in digital format, designing and implementing a website to serve the files, and a large enough server with enough bandwidth to handle all the downloads. Plus, since not everyone is of Radiohead caliber, you've got to spend some time and/or money to market to get people to hear about you. It's a lot of work. Now, imagine that processes done by every band on the planet. That's a lot of noise and not much signal, which is the essence of the problems with the music industry.

Self promotion is not the answer to the music industry's woes. Not every band has the resources to follow Radiohead's lead and go off and release their own. If they did, bands would never sign with record companies in the first place.

And while conniving and money-hungry, the record industry knows one secret about their industry: it's way to crowded for anyone to make sense of all of it. At least not a 16-year-old kid putting in 40 hours a week at school and stealing his Dad's beer on the weekends. People need someone to apply the filter to the collective fire hose known as the music industry, and periodically present them with well marketed and packaged musical acts that they can get behind and be a part of. For the recording industry, the formula is simple and effective: promote a new artist, collect money from CD sales, rinse, repeat.

But now that file sharing has blown the lid off of that model, record companies don't have control over the message any more. And while it's pissing them off, it's making consumers lives both easier and more complicated. People are free to listen to whatever band they feel like that moment, but there is no organization of that "noise" I made mention of before. How the hell does that 16-year-old kid know who to listen to? Radio sure isn't doing that job anymore.

That's part of the reason I founded TuneShout. To use the power of a website's user base to help people find the music that they want to hear. Radiohead doesn't have that problem, as I mentioned before. They're already rich and well known. Whatever they do, people will listen. But the Gossip is still, despite all their pending success, stuck in with the rest of the masses, trying to poke their head above the waves to get people to notice.

So if Radiohead's model isn't the solution, what is? Well, to be quite honest, I don't know for sure. If you can create a system that lets people easily find, discover, sample, fall-on-love with, follow and eventually buy the music of a band who is in control of their own destiny. And do it all under one roof. That's is the future of online music.

If you're a true fan of music, you go to a lot of live shows. But not all venues are created equal. Here are 10 of the best places to see a show in the world.

Red Rocks Ampitheatre
Morisson, Co

Originally created under FDR's New Deal, Red Rocks Ampitheare has become the place to see a show on earth. Aside from it's magestic buety, what really sets Red Rocks apart is its two 300 foot tall rocks surrounding the venue. They create some of the best acoustics that nature can provide.



Royal Albert Hall
London, England

Aside from music, this English concert hall has seen boxing, poetry and the first Sumo tournament held outside Japan. It has hosted everyone from Tiny Tim and Meatloaf to Led Zeppelin and The Who to Massive Attack and The Cure.



The Fillmore
San Fransisco, CA

The Fillmore is responsible for launching the careers of such phycadelic greats as The Grateful Dead, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, The Doors and Janis Joplin. That's a pretty impressive track record. Plus, if you go to the fillmore you're treated to a bathtub full of free apples!



Vienna State Opera
Vienna, Austria

If opera is your thing, then the Vienna State Opera is the place to go. Originaly built in 1863, the hall was bombed to pieces during WWII. It then reponed on November 5, 1955 and has operated ever since. Inside is one of the most magestic halls in all of classical music.



Gorge Ampitheater
George, Wash.

Second only to Red Rocks, the Gorge is one of the most beutiful places to go see a concert. The stage is perched at the edge of a high cliff overlooking the Comumbia river gorge, resulting in some really specacular views.



Bowery Ballroom
New York, NY

If you've been to a show in NYC, you know that it's more packed than the subway during rush hour. Not at the Bowery Ballroom. They somehow afford the most spacious concert setting in all of NYC. Add their ability to attract top-notch musical talent, and it's one sweet venue.



40 Watt Club
Athens, GA

Nestled way down in Athens, Ga, the 40 Watt Club has played host to some of the greatest musical talent to come out of the shoutheast US. Neurtal Milk Hotel, Of Montreal and R.E.M all got their start here.



Slane Castle
Slane, Ireland

Every year Slane Castle in Ireland hosts an all day concert for upwards of 80,000 people. Past acts have included R.E.M, the Rolling Stones, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and U2, who recorded their Unforgettable fire album there.



Paradiso
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Outside it's a dark and forboding former church, but inside its 3 large stained glass windows and balcony overlooking the stage make it one of the most awesome places to see a concert. In the past it has hosted everyone from Willie Nelson to the Rolling Stones, and now hosts other arts such as plays and lectures.



Olympia
Paris, France

Founded by the same dude who created the Moulon Rouge 1888, Olympia is the oldest music hall in all of Paris. After a decline in the 30's and early 40's, it became a movie theather, but then regained its music hall roots post-liberation in 1945.

In a time not to long ago, radio was pretty cool. DJs actually controlled the playlists full of real, talented, musicians. Listeners would turn to the iconic stations to discover new music and listen to their current favorites.

Not anymore.

Today, the radio is controlled by mega corporations who have their programming dictated in large part by the record companies who pay them to play their records. They figured out long ago that it's more cost effective to pay to promote the "marketable" acts, rather than promote the good ones. This isn't to say that the current top 40 on the radio are bad musicians - they're not - but they are 99% the product of corporate marketing efforts. It's a pretty souless institution.

Internet radio was supposed to change all that. The internet removed the historic frequency and licensing restrictions that made the barrier to entry for terrestrial radio so hard. And while thousands of internet radio stations have popped up, offering listeners hand picked playlists in any genre you could ever imagine, they have failed to take hold and offer the same level of service and penetration as good old AM & FM.

The reason for this, mostly, is the initial lack of penetration of broadband in the United States. People just weren't able to stream radio fast enough to be able to listen. And by the time they were, music downloads and MP3s became huge - so nobody cared about finding new music. They wanted to download all the music they were hearing on FM.

But that time is over. Radio has become even worse and people have gotten over the initial novelty of downloading music. People are looking for ways to find and discover new music. They're looking for that really knowledgeable DJ to play them that one Portishead song that causes them to say, "Who's this?" They don't know that yet, but they are.

So radio, if you're listening...here is your gameplan to success.

1. Find your niche in all of music, and hammer on it hard.
2. Play a wide variety of music, and make sure it's easy for people to figure out who they're listening to
3. Then, make the path from discovery to more information and the eventual download and/or purchase as easy as possible.
If you do that, you'll secure your role in the future of music.

In his comments about Fred Wilson's comments on Rhapsody hooking up with MTV, Gerd Leonhard drops this gem:

All-pervasive wireless broadband will kill the idea of 'listening only' versus getting a copy / paying for a digital download. Access will trump ownership. Therefore, the labels must monetize ACCESS first and foremost, and only THEN the copies.

While this sounds good in theory, I don't think we'll ever go to an "access only" market where the concept of ownership is no longer in existence.

I love music. I love listening to it, learning about it and evangelizing about it. But a crucial part of my love of music is owning it. I love my collection of vinyl records. I'm proud of my hard drive full of music. It's mine - something that I can call my own. And I don't like the thought that my music will only be available on the internet by logging in and accessing my OpenMusic account. It's not tangible. It's not mine.

What I think the future is, rather, is just access. Eventually if I want to listen to some new music that I just found out about I'll go hop on the internet and go find it, listen to it, and then acquire it. It's not really ownership, in the sense that I bought the copyright on it, but it is ownership in that I have a physical copy that I can do with it what I please.

I don't want to have to be hooked up to the net to get access to my music. I don't want to be tethered at all to listen to music. It severely limits my choices on how I listen to and enjoy my music. As with the music like water analogy, nobody forces you to only drink directly from the faucet, do they?

As I mentioned in my post on social networking and online music, online music has a problem. There is too much music out there. Every single artist will have fan(s) somewhere, but connecting the fans to the artist is a hard task. For the select few mega-popular artists, finding fans will be very easy. But for the rest of the artists - the 99% - connecting them to their fans the biggest thing holding back online music.

So how do you fix it? Well, if you look at other forms of media, you can find some answers. With film, critics reviews are widely read and widely trusted. What other medium has critics who are as famous as Ebert and Roeper? And with TV, the talent pool is a lot smaller and the barrier to entry is higher. Therefore, on the whole it's easy for the average person will be able to get their head around the relatively small amount of TV shows. available.

Thanks to technology, the barrier to entry for musicians creating music is almost non existent. For about $500, I can record myself playing my guitar in my bedroom at near professional quality, and then put it on TuneShout for the world to hear. It's not that hard. As a result, the world and its music websites are full of artists, most of them you will not like. So how do you find what you want?

Well, technology and computer algorithms can help. Services like Pandora and Last.FM can understand what you like and play you things you might also like.

As much as I bash it, the radio is another way people find new artists. Most commercial radio is pretty soulless nowadays, but there are still stations like KEXP where the DJs program the shows. You'll be listening to a song you know, and the DJ will play a song you've never heard. And the funny thing is - you'll like it.

Finally, people learn about new music from human evangelicalism. I don't know how many people I've made CDs of my music I think they might like. Usually they'll discover a new artist they've never heard of before.

You should be noticing a trend here: suggestion. Whether it be from a computer, an music nerd DJ or your friend, people find new music by getting it suggested to them.

Each of the services I mentioned above does a good job at its portion of the music equation, but they're usually self contained in the online music equation. You hear a new song on LastFM, but have to go elsewhere to download/purchase it. You can have a musical journey led by a DJ, but again you have to go elsewhere to hear more. Your friend may give you a copy of your new favorite artist's CD, but where do you go to talk about it or buy it for yourself?

A service/website that combines music evangelicalism by itself and its users in the form of automatic suggestions, radio/playlists & human edited suggestions is the future of music. If you can create a self contained universe where I can go to learn more about the artists I love, and have my hand held to find similar artists where I can listen to and download their music, you'll lead the way of the online music revolution.

There was an interesting article over at WebProNews today on Social Media, and its effects on the music market. It's low on substance, but it does get the ball rolling. In response to the article, Gern Lionhard posted a couple pictures.





Take a moment for those to sink in. Do you see what's going on there? MySpace and YouTube - the two most massive websites in the realm of social media and social networking - are having big impacts on somewhere between 20-40% of their users music buying habits.

What impact? Well mostly its music discovery and fan appreciation. Someone will see a music video or hear a song they like randomly on MySpace or YouTube, go research about the band and eventually become a fan.

The radio, traditionally the way most people found out about new music, is long gone people. You can find and listen to new music when and how you want on the internet.

But all is not perfect in the tubes. There are too many bands and too many people releasing their music online for any one person to make sense of it all. There is too much information and audio from music websites for anyone to go there and find an artist they really like.

Problem is, on any one particular music site there is usually only a small set of artists to choose from. And chances are, for every 100 artists you listen to you'll only really like 2-5. The other problem is that on the vast majority of music sites, sifting through the mediocre artists herd is left up to the user. Sure they have a "Top Artists" list, but it's rarely accurate or democratic. And you're telling me that on the internet, the best way people find new music is one or two lousy top 10 lists?

TuneShout attempts to combat the second problem with the stage, where site activity decides and shows who really is popular. The 1st problem is a little harder. How do you help people weed through the 95-97 artists they like to find the 2-5 they do? Nobody seems to have figured out a good way quite yet. Tomorrow, I'll share my thoughts.

The UK newspaper the Telegraph ran an article today on illegal music downloading. It's pretty short, but makes a grand conclusion.

John Enser, head of music at Olswang, said: "The music industry needs to embrace new opportunities being generated by the increasing popularity of music on social networking sites. Surfing these sites and discovering new music is widespread with the latest generation of online consumers but the process of actually purchasing the music needs to be made easier to encourage sales and develop this new market."

They're making reference to all the embedable music playing widgets on MySpace, Bebo and the like. Personally, I think this is great - as the widgets expose people to music they would have never heard before.

But as the article says, there is a disconnect between hearing an artist on Bebo and actually purchasing it. It's great if I can embed the music on my MySpace page, but there isn't a very large call to action to purchase the song. Snocap has made that call clear as the sun. But it's the wrong place and the wrong time for it.

Where Snocap falters, and where I think there is a breakdown in the customer experience, is from initial first artist contact transitioning in to purchase.

Lets take the progression of my coworker Matt.

Matt sits next to me at work, and unlike me, spends his free time running and not listening to as much music as possible 24/7. A little while ago I made Matt a CD of a lot of my better Hip-Hop. On it was a local group called the Blue Scholars. He liked what he heard, listened to the album I gave him and become a fan. So now, when their new album came out he went to iTunes and bought it.

This is a win for the future of music. Word a mouth and music evangelicalism has resulted in an online sale. The artist makes money and, seeing as Blue Scholars are their own record company, some big media company does not. It's great, and I love it. It is the future of music.

But. Lets change one little thing. Rather than me telling Matt about the Blue Scholars, assume that he found it from a music embed widget on my MySpace. He knows me, knows I have the MP3s of the artist, so he's going to ask me for it first. Or he'll download it illegally. Or, he'll go Google their name and look them up that way. Just because he can buy it right on my MySpace with Snocap doesn't make it any more likely that he will make a purchase. Yes the act of purchasing is easier, but making him a fan is just as hard as before - even with all this technology and social networking. Nobody makes music purchases like they buy candy bars in the checkout line at the grocery store. You have to work for those sales, and work hard.

So the question then becomes - who's doing the best job converting people in to purchasers? Snocap who supports their artist only with the tiny flash music store? Hardly. iTunes is huge and just does volume sales - they just provide the function. There are a few more places out there that support artists and offer a community, but I think you'll be hard pressed to find an online music store as community driven as TuneShout.

And in the end, that's what matters. When a user found out about an artist from a widget, they shouldn't be prompted to buy it right then. They should be taken back to a page all about that artist. A place where they can get to know them - maybe try out a few more of their songs. A place to read other reviews, see what other people thought about them. Then, in a day or 6 months from then, when they're ready to make their purchase - they can come back to the same place.

Last night we launched a new version of TuneShout - version 1.1 for those of you scoring at home. It's mostly a minor upgrade, and will be the last upgrade before we do a major upgrade in early fall.

Here is a short compact list of all the enhancements.

1. Reworked the Artist "biography" section to give it more structure. It is now broken out in to the sections, with two additional fields added: Musical Influences and Future Plans. In your Artist Account Edit page, you will able to add content to the two additional sections.
2. Bitrate is now analyzed during track uploads. Low bitrate songs will be prevented from being streamed due to the technological limitations of our Flash-based streaming engine. This will prevent the "chipmunk syndrome" for some artists.
3. Artists now receive emails when they make a sale a receive a review. This will help you guys keep tabs on your new reviews and your sales -- I know that some of you guys do have sales :)
4. Slight reorganization of the Artist Account section. We've reorganized the top of the Artist Account to make getting around and changing things a lot easier.
5. Addition of RSS links around the site. We already have a lot of RSS feeds for nearly every page on TuneShout, we've just made their existence a little more visible.
6. A system to "tell a friend" about artists and TuneShout. Now, if you find a band on our site that you want to tell a friend about, you'll be able to use our on-site email form to do so. Look for the "tell a friend" button on the left. You can see an example on my account. Also, users can tell a friend about TuneShout.

Enjoy the new features, and make sure to contact us with any problems or concerns.

TechCrunch is reporting that the United Kingdom has rejected a push to extend music copyrights beyond 50 years, to 70 years. The main reason for this decision? This graph.



Basically, in the new age of music downloads, record companies get more per song sale than they did in the old model of CD sales. More money? You've got to be kidding me.

Here at TuneShout, this is how we distribute the money we receive from a sale of an average track/album sale.



As you can see the artist makes the most, followed by us next to cover site management, development and bandwidth & hosting costs. ~10% goes to the credit card processor, but this number varies on the total dollar amount of the order.

In any event, though, I think we offer artists a much better deal than they can get elsewhere. While making money may not be the most important thing to an artist, our figures show we care about the artists' well being more than your average record company.

I came across the trailer/promo for this new documentary called Copyright Criminals : This is a sampling sport. Aside from having a lot of people in this sphere that I respect, it looks like a really great overview of fair-use sampling. Enjoy.

I've sure you're heard by now, cause it's been all over the news, but Prince decided to do a very creative and bold thing with the release of his most recent record Planet Earth. He gave it away, free, as an insert in the Mail on Sunday in the UK. Yes you read that right - free. As in he didn't make a penny on any record sales. In fact it actually cost him money to get sales for his album dude to the distribution costs. Ars Technica has a pretty good writeup of the whole story.

As many have also reported, this is just another nail in the coffin for already struggling CD sales. For artists, or at the very least Prince, CD sales don't matter anymore. At least not monetarily. They have always made most of their money touring and from merchandise. So it would be quick to say that what prince did was a vision of how music distribution will be in the future.

And wouldn't it be a great world? Imagine you're a pretty big fan of, say, the Decemberists. Rather than pay $15 for a CD or delve in to the world of illegal file sharing, all you have to do is go pick up a copy of the New York Times and you'll get it. And if you like the Decemberists even more, you can pay to go to their show or buy poster or something.

While I do like the direction that Prince's promotion did for the record industry, I think it's a very analog solution to the problem. The "insert my album in to the sunday paper" distribution mechanism will work for some, mostly big acts, but as a solution to CD sales and the music industry as a whole? Not really.

What if you live in Germany and you wanted Prince's new album? You can't easily get it because it was only distributed in the UK. Prince was limited by physical barriers: a limited number of CDs to print a limited number of inserts to manufacture. A limited number of papers to print and a limited network of distribution to push that paper out to the masses. It's a system that can't scale any bigger than human resources will allow.

What we need is a digital solution to the problem. You can replace all of it - the CD production, manufacturing the CDs, paying the newspaper, driving the papers all around the country - it all can be done better & faster by the internet. If prince had just given away his album online, he could have cut his costs down dramatically.

Obviously, digital files don't have the tactile feel of a real CD. Like I've mentioned before about the CD becoming obsolete, the online music experience is still not quite up to the quality standards of CDs. Things are improving, and TuneShout is part of that, but there is still a little bit to go.

Just a side note. For those of you who are interested, I wrote an article on the CakePHP Bakery about the initial development of this site. It's a pretty techy article, but offers a little bit of insight in to the history of the development of TuneShout.

TuneShout.com: Music Downloads and CakePHP

I'll be blogging later today on a more music-related subject. So check back this afternoon!

You may have already seen it, but Rolling Stone has a great article on the decline of the record industry. It's part one of two, but still worth a read.

The article is full of insiders look at the industry, such as this one:

"They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster -- that was the moment that the labels killed themselves," says Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm. "The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. They were all using the same service. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other [file-sharing services]."

I've never thought of it that way, actually, but Jeff is totally right.

There is more good stuff in the article, but I'll save rewriting it here. Just head over and read it.

In an interesting article on Audioholics a couple days ago, it appears that sales of physical CDs are going to be down 20% in 2008. This is more than the predicted 15% drop from earlier in the year.

To me at least, this isn't that surprising. Technology has always and will always advance. First we had film, then tapes, then digital devices for storing data. Technology will improve and things will get smaller, higher quality and more efficient. The move by consumers to slowly be favoring digital file downloads over CDs is the next step in that progression.

And the numbers don't lie. iTunes has 9.8% of the retail music marketshare. That puts them #3 in the world, behind Wal-mart with 15.8% and Best Buy with 13.8%.

The question then becomes: who is going to be progressive and go with the change? Filesharing and lawsuits aside, the RIAA and big name record labels have made the shift to offering their music for download. And that's great. Well, kind of.

See, one thing I neglected to mention when I wrote about the progression of technology is for the progression to succeed and a change to occur, the new technology has to be better than the last one. And if you think about it, digital downloads from record labels are worse than physical CD sales.

With CDs, you can loan them to your friend. Digital download with DRM, you can't. CDs can be played in your car, in your boom box, even in your personal CD player. Downloaded music is stuck to be played on your computer, or one of the approved list of devices for the license you agreed to by downloading the file. With a CD purchase you get cover art, lyrics, liner notes, etc. Digital downloads have the CD cover art, but that's about it.

I could go on and on, but you get my point. The experience of purchasing and downloading music files has to be improved for it to succeed long term. Right now consumers are caught between an overpriced and rapidly shrinking CD market and a lackluster value digital download market. Whoever figures out the blend of the two will lead the charge on the future of music sales.

I know it's not really relevant to online music news, new media or the development of this site, but I just got the best spam message. Ever.



It's short, sweet and gets right to the point, which I appreciate I guess. Either way, I think there may be some photoshopping of the scenario my "friend" VAHE lays out.