SF Musictech Redux

It's been a long week of music and technology conferences in San Francisco. It began Sunday with a meet-and-greet "speed dating" session at NARM, and has not let up for three days of action packed panel after action packed panel assessing the state of the music industry in 2008. Well, that's not entirely true...there were a few low spots in the action, but more on that later. In any event, I will fight through the conference fatigue to bring you the latest from SF MusicTech (back by popular demand).




Morning Sessions: Digital Thought Leaders, Online Video, Artist Activism, and Copyright Issues in Music Law

The great thing about version 2.0 of MusicTech is that this time around I brought a colleague with me, which means that I get to be two places at once.

I was introduced to an interesting start-up called Plugged In, which provides high definition video streams for musicians. While YouTube offers an average of 700kbps streaming speeds, Plugged In claims to provide 1.5mbps which, for the uninitiated, is staggeringly fast. The most compelling aspect of what Plugged In offers, however, is an adaptive streaming technology that (in theory) sidesteps the frustrations of buffering and packet loss by automatically adjusting the quality of video based on the fluctuations in bandwidth in the user's endpoint. I haven't tested this theory yet on my own, but the prospects are tantalizing.

In short, I can summarize everything else we've heard over five days of music industry conferences in one sentence: any revenue model that relies on the sale of little round plastic disks will soon be completely, unequivocally, 100% worthless.

Nobody is actually saying this, of course, but it is easy enough to read between the lines. As the commoditzation of recorded music pushes prices closer and closer to zero, the old school players in the music industry are being motivated primarily by fear.

Everyone has a different way of expressing this truth, and in the case of the major labels this expression comes in the form of transparent denial. And that's a-okay with me. The most commonly asked question in terms of digital and other so-called 'alternative' revenue streams is, "How do we monetize this?" If you work for a major label, the short answer is: you don't. The second most frequently asked question is, "How to we stop people from stealing our music on P2P sites?" And to that the answer is the same: you don't.

The major labels all have eloquent representatives who are very good at framing the debate around the types of questions they want to ask and answer. But ultimately this amounts to arguing over the best way to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is not to say that you can't make money anymore in the music industry. But lifeboats tend to be much more maneuverable than sinking ships.