Live Blogging Bandwidth 2009

Indeed, I say, Old Sport. This is a most dignified music conference, albeit lightly attended, but with the most respectable company in attendance at the University Club. After a brief meet-and-greet in the Library where we went round the room to discuss our most memorable experiences with an "album" (wikipedia), the conference is off to a smashing start. I decided not to mention my experience last year of receiving a leaked copy of the Black Keys' Attack and Release from a friend, but...alas, I digress.

So pour yourself a cognac and pull up a chair next to the fire. Bandwidth 2009 is about to begin.

Thursday

2pm - Balls of Steel

Unsurprisingly, women were noticeably absent from this panel. Larry Marcus, a VC with Walden Venture Capital, suggested that a better name would be "balls of glass" given the investment climate.

David Hymen, founder and CEO of MOG, just announced a $5 million round of funding for his company. Though he admitted to some trepidation when learning this week that iLike had been bought for $20 million by MySpace. "It was depressing to see that valuation for a company that had so much momentum," he said. "Exits have been tough," agrees Marcus. "At the end of the day, it's a question of love me or leave me. Either customers will pay for your service or they won't."

Mark Shedletsky, founder and CEO of BlueHaze, had this advice: "Avoid signing any contracts with a label." The consensus of the panel (much to the chagrin of one audience member) is that entrepreneurial start-ups can't afford to work with the Big Four because cost prohibitive licensing fees, seven-figure up front payouts, and annual minimums require too much start-up capital just to get off the ground.

3pm - By the Numbers

Corey Denis, VP of Marketing at reapandsow, jumped in with some hard data. The moral of the story is...marketing musicians is about telling a story.

What we have: listening habit data, traffic data, twitter data, facebook data, bit.ly data, blogger data, youtube data, data data data.

What we don't have: streaming music media data, all things MySpace, internet radio data.

"The point is," says Davis, "that with all this data, artist by artist, you can tell a different story." And she has some (anonymous) success stories to support her data.

So, let me tell my story: I'm in a band. We're really good. We aren't represented by an agent or a label, and we can't afford a publicist. Every week, iLike, ReverbNation, TuneCore and other analytics aggregators send me an email that says, basically, nobody is listening to your songs, nobody is buying your songs, and you don't have any concerts posted. Is that really the kind of useful data that's going to make the D.I.Y. promise of a "musicians middle class" a reality?

One telling bit of data was conspicuously absent from the discussion: sales.

4pm - Convo. with Bob Mould

Didn't make it. I chose instead to have a lager with the chaps in the pool room. Can you blame me? More enlightening conversation tomorrow...



Friday

The coffee's strong. The weather's warm. Totally wired, logged in, and ready for Bandwidth Day 2.



10am - Hindsight is 20/20

Ted Cohen of TAG Strategic set the tone right away: "How many of you have been to a panel I've moderated?" he asked. A smattering of hands. "And you came back?" he jibed.

First qusetion: "Compare and contrast a label licensing deal with a colonoscopy."

Tracing the modern music deal back to the early days of Shawn Fanning's Napster, the message of this panel is a simple one: the labels missed their last best chance to participate in the digital revolution a decade ago. Gerry Kearby of Neurotone remembered his days in the music industry this way: doing deals with the majors "was like talking with buggy whip manufacturers who were sure the automobile was not coming."

11am - Live Music 2.0



"Is live music replacing recorded music as the dominant platform?" asks Dave Rosenheim of JamBase. "The numbers support it."

In 2008, the live music business accounted for $7.2 billion in revenue. $1 billion came in the form of in venue sponsorship, and $500k in merch. Live music also appears to be recession resilient, and the industry is up a total of 140% since 2000.

By contrast, recorded music business is falling to $8 billion, down 40% from 2000. But is live music scalable? Ah, there's the rub.

1pm - Putting Artists Together With Fans

Back in the library for a discussion led by Gracenote VP of Product and Content Management, Stephen White...



(Apologies to jeddeth...I'm not in the main hall. But check out Digital Music News tomorrow, and you'll probably hear all.)

To what extent is the the job of the artist to personally reach out through social media, and to what extent does it rely upon user generated content? If reaching out to fans is the artist's exclusive responsibility, when is there time for creativity, and how to keep up with the myriad competing technologies out there? And if you leave it up to the fans, how do you control the quality of the content and monetize the pipeline?

The key may be in tracking and selling metadata that flows out of content consumption. "There's no limit to the amount of information that can be delivered in content metadata," says White. "Anything can be delivered, but there are standardized containers."

2pm - Business Pricing Models

Steve Grady, co-founder, president and COO for RoyaltyShare brings some depressing statistic statistics to bear on pricing models for music as a product. Currently, the $8 billion industry is crashing to zero.

**Speaking of crashing...due to an unfortunate and rather unexpected computer crash, the last two sessions went unblogged. In an imperfect technological world, sometimes you do just have to be there. Indeed, I say!!**