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2009 - The Pull Music Paradigm Shift Emerges

Here’s my prediction promise the project I’m working on: I intend to end the need to promote music. Outside of the social promotion people do after they discover music, artist-initiated self-promotion should vanish like the dinosaurs. But, that’s a mid-term goal. In 2009, I want everyone that thinks about the music business to have the Pull Music Paradigm Shift on his or her radar. If you have a music industry plan that begins in 2009, you have to put some of these eggs in your basket.

I’m intentionally jumping the music discovery and recommendation rails and calling it all the Pull Music Paradigm Shift because the music discovery tools that you’ve experienced so far haven’t shifted more than a bit of behavior. However, the stuff that’s about to come out of multiple R&D labs will shift an entire industry from furious push-promotion to pull-ready optimization as fast and as sure as Google changed ordinary business.

Over the last ten years, Google unwound two hundred years of the ability to price ‘business’ based upon whom you know and whom you take out to dinner. Google’s relentless dedication to organizing the world’s information has given us all dead-simple access to the knowledge of where stuff is and what it costs. Now, for just about anything consumers want, they can ‘go direct’ at the lowest price; no middlemen needed or included.

The Pull Music Paradigm Shift will change the music industry like Google changed the business world. Push middlemen with secrets and access to exposure and success will give way to a new layer of pull optimizers and pull experts that are skilled at leveraging pull technology and navigating the Shift.

I’m compelled to reiterate that this is a business plan, not a prediction. In this post, I am going to describe how it works and what will be different as pull overtakes push (promotion).

Like any technology, what I’m describing is evolving; it doesn’t and it won’t work perfectly at first, but it doesn’t have to. The world is drowning in music. The technology described here is a productivity tool that will be used to chop the haystack down from 30,000,0000 songs (plus the million songs a year that are being uploaded to the internet now) to 30,000 to 3,000 to 300 songs (needles). Moreover, it’s only going to get better over time.

The technology and methods you probably haven’t you seen yet.
I’m not talking about simple recommendation tools like Genius from iTunes, and I am not talking about any existing websites that currently feature a bit of music discovery technology. The Pull Music Paradigm Shift leverages everything you have seen today plus core technologies that will be available in 2009/2010. Here’s a rundown (1,2,3):

1) Music Experience Interfaces
Music Experience Interfaces (MEIs) will enable users to chop through mountains of music in minutes. MEIs can be visual, tactile, haptic (think Wii controller) and auditory all at the same time. Imagine using your hand to skim through music as it’s visualized on a wide screen, while rapidly listening to overlapping clips to find the exact songs or the music experiences (playlists) you desire. Have you seen the user interfaces in the movie Minority Report?

The video above is not a mockup; it’s footage from a working application (under development) created by Paul Lamere’s team at Sun Labs in Massachusetts (The AURA Project). Paul and his team have some of the smartest music discovery technology I have seen yet. If you are an executive working in the music industry, make an appointment to visit Sun when you’re in the Boston area. Contact me for additional information.

Here are a few links to people working in this space:

• Paul Lamere @ Sun Labs
• The Centre for Digital Music
• Anita Lillie

2) Funnel Filters
Every great music experience interface has to be attached to the ability to intuitively and rapidly funnel music.

Slicing, dicing and funneling music implies that music can be scored, ordered and sorted. The uniformed pushback I always get about filtering music is that somehow the process will force music into some sort of most-common denominator, homogenized hell. You can shelve that thought. Music can be scored, ranked, ordered and funneled against any song set you can imagine. If there’s a segment of the population that’s looking for sad country songs about love and war but not about dogs, that sort of sound like Kanye West and U2, then that’s where the user will begin his journey. Here are some of the ways songs can be scored:

• Similarity scored - how completely similar is a song to all songs in a set (any set).
• Sonic attributes scored - scored against certain sonic attributes such as melody or beat.
• Emotional content scored - the highs and lows (topology) of a song or song segment as compared to all the songs or song segments in a set (used in synch licensing).
• Market demand scored - songs are scored against hits.
• Lyric content scored - the occurrences of lyrics compared to songs in a set.
• Meta tag analysis scored - the occurrences of meta tags compared to songs in a set.
• Sounds-alike scored - does a song sound like songs in a song set.
• Market traction scored - scores based upon sales, shares, downloads and plays.
• Professionally scored - as scored/rated by music industry professionals.
• Crowd scored & social ‘friends’ scored - scores are crowd-sourced.
• Price scored (free or not) and proximity scored (geographic measurement).

Once again, the ability to score and funnel music will be as simple as adjusting faders, dragging songs and waiving your controller. The user’s ability to chop through a mountain of music will only be limited by how fast his or her ears can process overlapping clips while visually subdividing a full screen of information.

3) Distributed & Cloud Computing
While some of this technology will be accessible through the browser, there’s a lot of it that will require the user to download and install an application. To leverage the power of your computer, to avoid the added costs and hassles of licensing the major label content that you already own, and to create the ultimate end-user experience, expect applications to process music and the user interfaces locally, while shifting processed songs and metadata in and out of the cloud. This bit of the pull-technology-kit may take the longest to reach consumers. However, I expect more than a few people within the music industry to be using much of what’s described here in 2009/2010 to locate the gems buried in the beach. (I’m also looking forward to the mix of music discovery and cloud computing options that Sun will be shopping over the next year or so.)

New Business Models Needed
Music is still going to be sold and music is going to be free. However, I expect pull music technology and propositions to further sponge up the disposable time that people can invest into music consumption. As I have said before, when you attach this stuff to a database of one or two million songs, everyone is going to find the stuff (music or the general music experience) they are looking for. Lots of new music will be discovered, which will further dilute the time people spend on mass-marked (pushed) music.

So, what are the behaviors that shift as we transition from push to pull?
Prior to Google nobody talked about adwords, adsense, search engine optimization (seo), search engine marketing (sem), relevancy, organic search results and things like link farms. The Pull Music Paradigm is going to birth its’ own set of similar verbs and practices that didn’t exist yesterday; here are a few to consider (A, B, C):

A - Song Data Manicuring
To enable the creators of Music Experience Interfaces to EASILY obtain (mine for) the information needed to funnel music in a myriad of ways, song owners will be driven to be the custodians of every statistic, analysis, review, tag and chunk of relevant data they can attach to their songs.

B - Song (Data) Planning
The song scoring and funneling methods described above are also a reflection of the trend analysis and trend visualization criteria that will be at the fingertips of just about anyone. Sixty minutes in front of a flat screen full of information will be telling for any songwriter or music industry professional. As sure as you believe that featuring a kazoo in your next song probably isn’t going to work, you’re going to quickly develop a sense for what will. Will this make music creation formulaic? No never. Anomalies and outliers are still going to bust trends every day. However, marketplace knowledge will be as accessible and usable as the repertoire of music knowledge any artist brings to the songwriting table.

C - Song Data Gaming and Validation
As sure as humans work to trick Google to gain higher organic search standings, there’s going to be song data optimizers that will attempt to profit from gaming the music funnels; it will be a cat and mouse game. And, just as Google tirelessly works at achieving relevancy (you usually get relevant information from Google), the creators of Music Experience Interfaces combined with the data aggregators will work to ensure that the music funnels are also accurate and relevant.

The End of Mass-Market Music Promotion
The result of music promotion can be summed up as something called market traction. Market traction is just one-way to score (measure) and funnel music. The visualization (the graph, the plot) of music that’s mass-marketed is going to be obviously different than the visualization of music that’s found using other funnel criteria and then genuinely promoted (recommended) by identifiable segments of the population. As long as there are record labels that still generate billions of revenue from music sales, traditional music promotion will continue. However for everyone else, music promotion is something that fans will do after they filter, find and discover new songs. Since the everyone-else method will be far more cost effective (now that the product is now 99 cents or less), enduring and visually perceptible, I predict plan that mass-market promotion will have a short shelf life.

I don't use Music Think Tank to overtly push my projects, just my ideas.  However for the sake of credibility, I can tell you that Music Xray is where I am working on much of what I described in this post.  Don't expect miracles.  Music Xray is going to take two to three years to fully build.