Thanks to our friends at Aderra, I made the trek to Hollyweird for the New Music Seminar at Henry Fonda Theatre. This is a longer than usual post but there was a lot of invaluable information shared throughout the 10 hour seminar. Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Entertainment and co-founder of NMS kicked off the seminar with a welcome address to attendees.
He provided a lot of data and graphs — something I’m not used to seeing at music industry functions 
In 2008, there were 133,000 album releases of which only 5,945 artists sold 1000+ albums. 17,000 albums sold one copy. Wow. Silverman, who sounded like he needed some coffee early on, says the music industry may be bottoming out but opportunity rises from obscurity, claiming the next ten years will be the golden age of music. We’re back in the age of singles, where in the next few years singles will sell five times as much as the album. Albums will have fewer songs a la the Beatles and the Doors. During his speech, there was a clear reminder to artists in attendance — stop waiting for someone to come help you (who actually still does this?). Those days are over. Next year, digital sales will ultimately pass physical. Web 3.0 will provide more and more opportunities for artists to break from the web.
The New Music Business
The first “movement” (panels were called movements, moderators were called conductors…) focused on fan marketing and relationships and how to maximize revenue from your core audience. “Crush Your Distance” was the underlying theme of the panel — close the gap between you and your fans. Other things to keep in mind:
- be active, consistent and authentic
- consider creating exclusive products (not necessarily just music) for your most active fans
- create scarcity, something that only the biggest fans get
- divise a system for understanding your fans
- build your own model and be unique to your niche audience
- determine the balance of nurturing existing fans and getting new ones
- establish the chain: artists –> marketing –> technology –> fans
BTW, Reverb Nation’s Mike Doernberg says he’s tired of hearing about DIY this DIY that. Because once your act gets bigger, you’ll find yourself bringing in a support team anyway. This underscored the whole “stop waiting for someone to come help you” theme, because ultimately, an artist or band is just another small business.
Keynote Speech
Spotify’s Daniel Ek took the stage for the keynote…the bright 26 year old said Spotify’s 7 million users have created 100,000,000 playlists on his service — and the service isn’t even available in the US– just seven countries to date. He is standing behind a subscription service for music while criticizing iTunes and comparing Spotify to it at the same time.
How does it work? Search for any track, album or artist. Within two seconds, you’re listening to and creating playlists. Share with friends on email, Facebook or Twitter (one of its biggest traffic sources). Ek says its like having the world’s biggest music library and selection of mix tapes in one.
Spotify aims to bring unknown artists out of obscurity. Artists will have profile pages — Ek says there will be no preferential treatment to promoting profiles. The first thing that happens when you log in to Spotify is the “what’s new” page featuring about 20 albums — 50% from established artists (those already popular in Spotify’s catalog) and 50% from totally new artists (randomly generated). Ek says they will receive a tremendous amount of traffic, claiming more than 3,000,000 people across Europe access this page a day. Ek says Spotify will become very social as it moves ahead — look for the platform to break a lot of new artists. More than KROQ could have ever imagined.
Marketing and Promoting
LA Times’ Jon Healey conducted the next movement. Derek Sivers who recently sold his company CD Baby, Corey Denis of Not Shocking, Alexandra Patsavas from Chop Shop, Microsoft’s Christina Calio and Greg Estes from Mozes all had interesting feedback and data:
- hire sync agents for music placement — but they should work on fee basis, not percentage of royalties
- 90,000 music downloads a day on Xbox
- bands should notify their digital distributors of music placements in TV, fim etc.
- musicians miss out by not having a mobile list (provides immediacy for those not in front of a computer)
- GIVE STUFF AWAY (another reoccurring theme)
Denis reminds bands of what are not good investments: band bios (no one cares), automated bots (not true fans) and spending time on sending spamming everyone (pick 10 people who fit your audience, not 100 who don’t). Sivers also suggested bands close their computer and start practicing.
Differentiation
Tranter from SPW
KCRW’s Jason Bentley was up next joined on stage by live music producer Tom Jackson, Rodney Jenkins of Darkchild Productions and Justin Tranter, lead vocalist for Semi Precious Weapons. There were a lot of quotables about the music creation process and performance.
This was also the time of day where everyone at the entire seminar needed a venti Starbucks. The Mountain Dew they were handing out simply was not enough.
But, we particularly enjoyed Tranter saying rockers are afraid to look happy onstage — and we agree, people like to see other people happy, or smiling. Jenkins advises that when people tell you to turn left, always go right. And never try to be relevant, but revolutionary.
“Don’t be a jukebox on stage, work your merch and shake every hand,” says Jackson.
Get the FU#% Out of Bed
Dace Lory was the final conductor, overseeing my favorite panel including author Martin Atkins, AEG Live’s Eliott Lefko, Kevin Lyman from Warped Tour and manager Martin Winsch. Atkins stole the show in my opinion…and it wasn’t because he tossed scores of blueberry muffins into the hungry audience. He had a visual presentation drawing laughter after almost every sentence. The group offered their advice on building attendance, winning over fans and making a profit at your shows.
“Bands need to practice in horrible conditions,” says Atkins adding, “Be nice to your local sound guy.” There’s a lot of chatter amongst bands in the industry about sound checks. If you still think they are a must, you’re kidding yourselves. “If there’s no sound check, who gives a sh!t?” asks Atkins. The whole panel basically dumped on sound checks agreeing that if there’s magic in the room, people will see it.
Atkins specific advice to bands glared on the huge backdrop behind the stage reading “Have a FU#%ING strategy.” Quick to follow was “Get the FU#% out of bed!” The panel agreed that musicians need to stop blaming everyone for anything (here! here!) because everything is your responsibility. Play every gig like it’s your last…every day is a new day.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. The face of music is changing while the artist is getting smarter, competition is fierce and there’s just going to be more of it. The question is who is willing to work hard enough, fast enough and thorough enough to make an impression and break through the obscurity? Who will treat their core fans like the gold they are, the ones that keep the band afloat? Who is willing to buy the sound guy a cup of coffee? “Good things come to those who wait” could not be farther from the truth, so keep that in mind and don’t forget to “get the FU#% out of bed!”
Be sure to search out #NMS on Twitter for all the attendees tweets and feedback about the seminar. Thanks again to Ed Donnelly @aderra for the opportunity:
Dan and Ed
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