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Last night at an event I had to introduce myself to a few people and as I’ve been doing since I left WMG, it goes something like:

“I worked as the head of technology at Warner Bros. Records and Warner Music Group until I left in January”

That is a pedigree origin story.

A friend who I was with admonished me however: “Tell the real story!”

Now, the real story I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by, and proud of.

“I ran a fan site for R.E.M. since I was 16, and started working at their label in 2005.”

That is the passion origin story.

This begs the question: what matters most, pedigree or passion? Is it better to be defined by what you did, or why you did it?

I don’t have the answer to that.

But I suppose I’ll have to get used to answering the question of “what do you do?” with “well, when I was 16, I was really bored one evening….”

“Better“, “More“, “HD”,”Flash”,”Multitasking”, “Performance”, “Conference Calls”, “Thinner” and “Lighter”

Marketing defined by comparatives.

“Sharing memories,” “good book,” “cook”, “cheer”, “meetings”, “home movies”, “learn” and “how we…”

Marketing defined.

Lesson over.

Use the second screen as a distraction free, uncluttered way to lay out pallets in full screen apps. Here is an example with Omnigraffle. This works well with Keynote as well.

Omnigraffle as a full screen app

A lot of the punditry in the music business press these days is obsessed with “rights.” And this extends down into things like contract negotiations between artists and labels, labels and companies, VC’s and companies, etc. Who has master rights? Streaming rights? Sync rights? Publishing? Are rights-holders being compensated fairly?

All good questions. All worth discussing.

But something that artists and creators are missing is: Experiential Rights

Who owns your experience?

An artist in 1970 did. It was hand crafted, from studio to wax and beyond. They knew that given all possible modes of experience, in the end it came down to a needle on the record.

An artist today loses control as soon as they print out of ProTools or Logic and go to mastering. From then on, what was once the experience they created gets down sampled, hybridized and subjected to all manner of devaluing. It becomes a negotiation tool for some, just a file for others, a URL for others, a “package deal” for others. A notch on the business development or marketing belt for others.

All of this ends up creating experiences that in some cases are amazing (think what Apple does) and in some cases is not (think of what Nokia did with Comes With Music, or Sony’s digital offerings).

Here is my message to artists: your fans do not give two shits about your lawyers ability to negotiate control of your content and legal rights. They only care about the experience through which they participate in what you create.

If I was an artist, or I advised artists, I’d tell them to leverage the control of their master rights to participate and be an influencer of the experiential rights around their content. In the end, the onus of representation of what you create isn’t going to be on you, but on who you allow to turn the bits into audio. There are great actors in the space, and there are bad actors in the space.

Who do I consider good actors? The hot one for the moment is turntable.fm. And why are they hot? They turned the bits of music into audio with a social element. They take the content and add value to it through a social participatory model that feeds into the emotional aspects of what makes music powerful: an ambient identity transference. You become your music and get validation from other people confirming and validating what you love. It’s visceral and powerful to see the meter creep toward “Rock Out!”

Value in the music business though is an odd thing: the more value added to the music by the fan directly, the less influence the rights holders have over it, and the more influence the creators of representational systems (i.e., turntable.fm) and rights creators have (i.e., artists going directly on turntable.fm with stuff that their labels don’t own). And rights holders do not like being taken out of the value equation.

Call it Kaplan’s Law: the more value a non-music company adds to the fan/artist relationship, the bigger the threat to those who’s business depends on being between the two.

Its of little surprise that it took two guys in New York to add something of value on top of something that RealNetworks, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI created in 2001 (Musicnet, later Medianet, which turntable is built upon). It took 10 years to take MediaNet and make it a transformative and compelling user experience, by a startup that formerly made QR code stickers.

When the media companies participate in the value chain, the products motivation is oriented toward creation of shareholder rather than user value. You can not create a compelling product dictated by 18 month hockey stick projections. They dilute good products into bad, force companies to cut their nose to spite their face, and make not doing deals more profitable than even the legal process to get one done. When riding litigation toward an exit exceeds the value of doing a deal, something is wrong.

To artists: own your experiential rights. Participate in technology and hold your representatives (lawyers, labels and management companies) to the standards you want your content held to once you lose control of it.

To turntable.fm: keep doing what you are doing.

To already wealthy artists (Lars Ulrich, Bono, etc): invest in turntable.fm

I’ve been a Spotify user for a few years now thanks to an early hook up from Daniel. And I love Spotify. It truly is like magic, and really fun to use. However, I don’t find myself using it all that often. Paradoxical? Maybe.

The issue for me is how I consume music. I don’t consume music like I consume information. I curate, digest, browse and meander the stacks as it were. Maybe it is a generational thing, as I do remember going to Tower Records every Saturday morning and doing the same. What it comes down to is that Spotify democratizes music to such an extent that it becomes just files and audio rather than atomic entities known as albums, artists and genres.

This might be addressing a nascent behavior in terms of music consumption, and I suspect it is judging from my younger family members, but I think something is missing.

Try going to Spotify and browsing movie soundtracks. I’ll wait.

Try searching for John Williams. He is not a guitarist, but that is what comes up mixed in with all of the soundtrack work he has done.

And this is not something unique to Spotify, but also endemic to Rdio and Mog. Mog at least has a page of curated soundtracks, but its just as hard to find them “in the wild” as it is on Spotify. The same applies to Rdio.

iTunes to me is like my Tower Records experiences on Saturday morning as a kid. I can browse genres, artists and albums. It still holds precious something I still hold precious, and while I know I’m in the minority (maybe), it does have a huge effect on my consumption behavior. I find myself curating my taste on iTunes, and broadening my taste on Spotify/Mog/Rdio/Rhapsody. I also find myself creating music-as-atmosphere on the streaming services, and music as focus on iTunes.

Spotify hitting the US is way overdue, and my hope is that they fix some of the data issues, and discovery issues and it grows to making music something to appreciate again. The trending toward this is emerging with things like Turntable and Soundtracking (both worthy of more posts), which I feel are more relevant forms of social discovery than the native Facebook integration in Spotify.

My biggest fear though is one of the biggest strengths of Spotify as a technology platform: they could make a new client for searching for photos and nothing much has to change in terms of UX. The user experience of Spotify is not endemically tied to music, and music deserves its own native experience model. Music is unique still, and different than files, photos, videos or software.