Content Matters

Music continues to be one of the leading categories for emerging technologies.

This week marked the launch of mashup BandsInTown.

BandsInTown is an online community that lets users track concerts for their favorite bands.  BandsInTown imports your music preferences from last.fm, then matches that to concert schedules from your geographic region.  The resulting concert cloud helps you find upcoming shows you might not be aware of.

While the cloud can include acts you don't listen to, the larger items match to the ones that show up higher in your last.fm rankings.  You can mouse over a link to see their upcoming shows in your area.

Clicking any of the bands brings you to a wiki-styled landing page which shows the upcoming show(s) but also has links to an artist page, maps to the venue and space for additional images or band info.  All of these pages are designed for user-generated content.

The event awareness space is attracting attention with sites like eventful, Oodle's Bandtracker and others.  What  separates BandsInTown is its ability to import your last.fm preferences, its easy-to-navigate tag cloud and its focus on wiki-like features.  I'd like to see them add a Facebook plugin to make it easier to share events with friends.

Thanks to Frank Gruber for the heads up on BandsInTown.

CBS Corporation has acquired social media music site Last.fm for $280 million.

Last.fm today has roughly 15 million users of the largely free service, which takes a "wisdom of crowds" approach to music recommendations.  While other services, such as Pandora, are compelling, what makes Last.fm so successful is the fact that it's not intrusive.  Users simply download an iTunes plugin which monitors the music they play.  For example, you can see the music I listen to on my last.fm page.

According to the press release,"The Last.fm management team will work with all relevant CBS divisions to apply their community-building and technology expertise to extend CBS businesses online and within the mobile space."

This acquisition, coming on the tail of the smaller Wallstrip deal, makes it clear that CBS is taking a more serious look at new technologies.  It will be interesting to see whether they can leverage these new capabilities across their traditional businesses.

While the Arctic Monkeys have been credited (on this blog and elsewhere) with leveraging the web and social sites to launch their music career, they're not the only ones to have done so.

Next week, one of my favorite new performers, Lily Allen, will have her CD released in the United States.  Lily Allen's ska-influenced alt-hip-hop has gained her a strong audience in the UK and I expect her to see similar success in the U.S. markets.  Her music is tinged with sarcasm, humor and a bit of pretentiousness as might come from a 21-year old who seems wise beyond her years.  While the song Smile was her first big UK hit, I prefer the darker LDN and humorous Knock em Out.

What makes the Lily Allen story unique is how she leverage social networks not only for publicity, but as an online focus group to shape her first CD, Alright Still.  According to this Billboard article, Allen posted new tunes to her MySpace page, then gauged the feedback from her fans.  In fact, that process helped her validate some of the songs against the advice of her record label.  To reach that success, Allen apparently spent hours each night online, chatting with fans and reading their comments.  While much was made last week of the new blog launched by 73-year old Marriott CEO Bill Marriott, that seems like just an online press release by someone who admittedly cannot type. 

To really engage your audience using social software requires a significant commitment.  Clearly, Lily Allen is an early success story of that process.  For those who haven't heard her music yet, I'd suggest you give a listen at her website.  For those looking at how to leverage technology to launch a new brand, you might learn a few things by following her path.

When I heard the news this morning that Tower Records was shutting its doors as it declared bankruptcy for the second time in two years, my heart sank.  Tower had been a huge part of my music life for many years.  The Greenwich Village Tower, on West 4th and Broadway, in particular had been a place to go, not only to buy CD’s, but to discover new bands and even meet new people.  Prior to Tower’s opening the Village store in 1983, boutiques like Second Hand Rose and Bleecker Bob’s were my primary sources of music.  Then came Tower, with its vastness and diverse collections, and it became my top music source.

Then, I thought about the last time I was actually in a Tower Records store.  It was probably about three or four years ago, and then was simply to kill time before meeting a colleague for drinks nearby.   I realized that, while I still buy some CDs, I’ve bought them almost exclusively from Amazon for the past 10 years.  And today, I’m more likely to download music from eMusic or iTunes than to buy a CD, unless I know that I want the whole thing.

And while Tower once seemed a great place to discover music, that discovery process was mostly  serendipitous.  No one there knew my tastes, and they certainly didn’t store my listening patterns.  Today, I’m much more apt to use Last.fm or the music blogs via Hype Machine to identify new music.  While I might have been able to find Lily Allen’s Smile playing at Tower, it’s much easier to browse the blogs, listen to a few samples, then download a track or two.

While someone is likely to buy the Tower name, it’s unlikely that any buyer will retain their brick and mortar stores.  And, while part of me wishes they could survive, I also realize that I'll hardly notice it when they're gone.

“Big brother is listening.”

In light of recent news of NSA wiretaps and FBI “raids” on libraries that may sound ominous. But, what if you asked “big brother” to listen in?

That’s the idea behind last.fm. Last.fm, formerly AudioScrobbler, is an iTunes plugin that drives a music recommendation engine. The concept is pretty simple. The plugin monitors all the music you listen to on iTunes, generating lists of your favorite performers and songs, then compares those to others in their database.

Using various matching algorithms, Last.fm is able to create music neighbors, people whose listening habits are similar. The more interesting information comes when you click on a performer you like. The Last.fm engine quickly shows you other “similar” bands. I have found this a great way to discover new bands. For example, if you look at the Arctic Monkeys, you’ll see Maximo Park, the Libertines, the Subways, the Rakes and other UK indie bands. Another useful feature is that you’ll see the songs for each band or performer ranked by the number of times they are listened to. Want to sample a few songs from the Subways? With just a click you’ll see their most popular songs on Last.fm are Oh Yeah and Rock and Roll Queen.

Last.fm also supports tagging of songs and artists, as well as the ability to recommend an artist to another last.fm user. Outside of the “neighbor recommendations”, the community aspects of Last.fm are modest today, but there’s certainly opportunity for growth.

Last.fm has also launched the last.fm player, a personalized online radio station. With the Last.fm player you can listen to your own favorites or choose to listen to what they call neighbor radio. And now, my biggest complaint about last.fm has been addressed. Most of us listen to a lot more music on our iPod than on our PC. Yet Last.fm only picked up what was played on your PC. Now third parties have developed free plugins that will take your iPod usage and include that in your Last.fm results.

Last.fm also makes your listening habits accessible via an RSS feed. The feed itself doesn’t serve any great purposes today (not sure anyone out there needs real-time reporting of what I’m listening to), but could lend itself to an interesting mashup. What if VNU’s Billboard were to layer their sales rankings on top of Last.fm play lists, then cross-reference those by country? It might make for some interesting predictive capabilities for the music industry. Fred Wilson, in the Music section of his blog, includes his weekly and all-time top 10 playlists from Last.fm.

So, what’s the message for content providers?

First, monitoring customer behavior is not a bad thing. In fact, if you are upfront about what you’re doing and offer clear and compelling benefits to your users, they will welcome the monitoring.

Second, recommendation engines are not simply for e-tailers. If you can leverage community usage behavior to cluster similar content together, it can create a powerful and compelling recommendation engine. Combine that with simple distribution tools such as RSS and you have a low-cost, high value tool to promote new content to existing users. 

P.S. For those interested in knowing what I am listening to, you can visit my last.fm profile.