the New "Ad Supported Music" Music Business Model and Myspace

[drakewire]

Lets Talk Music Business Politics....

Last week, I got off the phone with a developer at Myspace who I have known for quite some time. During our discussion, I brought up the idea in a joking manner, "Hey You know Myspace should offer - Ad Supported Downloads" where users can get music for free and artist get paid for their plays. He Chuckled, and said "can you imagine talk about what a monopoly that would be". I went to work in the studio that night and all I could think about was, "Jesus that would be huge!"

Some of you already know about We7.com which allows artist to come an upload their music, of course the long and the short answer is that they dont know how much they will be paid, when they will be paid, and instead we have to rely on Peter Gabriel the business guru to come to the aid of saving the music business. Genesis didn't save the business, how the heck is he! Sorry, media grafting is an idiotic business model, every savvy mixing engineer knows that if you graft the beginning of the song with some five second piece of ad, it wouldn't be long until the song was purchased legitimately and then sewn back together with Wavelab and then shared.


So I called my buddy at Myspace back, after doing some research and sure I found out that there are a handful of other companies I found in my quest, but none of them have mostly gotten out of the park yet. However, Myspace has the largest listening audience in the world, 190 million users and growing. Most of which are kids and young adults who have nothing better to do than to sit on their computers and write comments on user profiles. The Myspace flash player is badly in need of a makeover, and this time I believe that it should include a little media window to the left, where normally pictures go, but instead the artist can choose an option to allow the song to be downloaded from myspace by using that little picture window to the left on the player for a video advertisement.

That one little picture could be worth billions of dollars to not only myspace, but in turn to the artist themselves. Plus, Wah La Music is a free business model where everyone wins. His Response,"Sounds Good, Myspace would never go for it. Could you imagine the spam wars! Its a cool idea in concept, but implementing it. Thats another accounting nightmare."

WHY NOT! Myspace in one fell swoop of programmatic genius could save the music business. He said it wasn't that simple.

I am a dreamer, a pragmatist, but by golly I am determined to get Myspace to do this. If they did this, it would put Itunes out of Business in well about ten seconds. I figured it would take about ten seconds once the code was fixed on the player to do this and the advertisers were ready to do business, but every download company on the web would be dead in the water same with the P2P Market, why share something when you can get it free while checking your messages, stalking people, it sounds brilliant!

Whats in it for the Advertiser? 190 Million people viewing your ad, in fact, in some cases on huge bands websites like Avril Lavigne, one second could mean millions of dollars in revenue. So instead of having one big banner at the top, they would have one in that cute little window

I have developed an idea of what Im talking about and you can either visit my myspace profile or follow this link and it will show you, while this is very much a beta version to demonstrate the business model, it allows you to see what I am talking about.... Its in the bottom left column on my myspace or
this link


Tell me your thoughts...

[Bob Olhsson]

You can hear precisely where advertising supported music leads on every US commercial radio station.

[themaidsroom]

Originally Posted by Bob Olhsson

You can hear precisely where advertising supported music leads on every US commercial radio station.

it's pretty great !

[Jim@SSL]

They would have to sort out their codec. Posting music on your Myspace site does terrible things sonically.

[7161]

Tell me your thoughts...

oh yeah great idea mate





.. can i buy some moon real estate from you by any chance?

[joeq]

Never mind ad- supported music, we now have ad-supported ads here in the US

I was looking at the TV listings the other day and at the top of the listings there was a banner AD for a new show. This ad presumably supports the TV listings.

A woman in the photo had large breasts, so naturally I clicked on the banner to find out more about the program.

Before I could get to the page -which remember is an advertisement promoting a new show- I had to watch a BMW commercial!

[joelpatterson]

Nah, what you saw was a BMW "educational public-service announcement."

[drakewire]

.. can i buy some moon real estate from you by any chance?

Thats exactly the problem with the music business. Everyone wants to hold on to the same business models that are rapidly dying in exchange for mocking the concept. The point of ad supported downloads on myspace is that if its downloaded its the original uploaded format. So if Joe blow artist uploads higher bit rates the files are only converted for streaming purposes, if the artist were to allow downloads then of course it would be the original format of the file.

The ad supported model is truly the only viable model out there for artist and in turn the sound recording business. Giving it away is the only option now days, whether it be by play or download, so we have to make money somehow. After all last I checked an estimated 6 billion files are illegally traded a year, sounds like somebody better start a model that works, or in the end, Sound Engineers across the globe will be out of business. The the moon real estate will sound really good...


But dont worry Im working on it...

[Bob Olhsson]

Originally Posted by drakewire

The ad supported model is truly the only viable model out there for artist and in turn the sound recording business. Giving it away is the only option now days,..

Ad supported music takes the choice of music away from music fans and hands it over to advertisers who want to choose music that will sort people into different demographic groups.


In truth, advertising supported anything has virtually always been artistic suicide.

[drakewire]

Ad supported music takes the choice of music away from music fans and hands it over to advertisers who want to choose music that will sort people into different demographic groups.


In truth, advertising supported anything has virtually always been artistic suicide.

In all reality, its the artist that gets to make that decision, not the music fan, and where have you been? Record labels have been sifting music group catalogs into demographics, since oh just recently, the 1950's. However, seeing that you are in the business, I figured Id respond from the opposite side of the fence, as a musician.

Musicians, especially unsigned musicians, have been enticed with the social networking concept so much that they officially give their songs away everyday on Myspace, Tagworld, Garageband.com in exchange for attention, all while making the parent website rich with advertisement dollars. Nothing however of those dollars goes to the content provider. Attention is always nice and some bands have even grown a following based on the tools that these websites provide. However, the whole thing is ad based and deceptive.In fact, you may be like most people and still believe "Tom" of Myspace started the website and that he started it from his garage, which is a big little PR Lie to get people to come for the advertisement. They decided along time ago that the social networking site needed a face that people could relate to and the fact that Myspace offered bands a way to promote their music after MP3.com failed, eUniversal the actual company that started myspace, felt that it was a golden idea to increase market share. Since the fact was, that artist would never be paid to put their music on the website and such was voluntary, in exchange, Myspace got to convert the music to its own use without royalty.

However, for the most part, the deludge and enormous amount of choices in music on these major sites. The music fan and or regular users of these sites are becoming more and more aware of the trickery that bands utilize to get people to hear their music. The biggest question is for what? So they can say, "hey cool song" and "hey I'll come to a show". Most of the people never do, the traditional method of gigging until you make it, still applies for all new artists.
The idea that someone might purchase from the ever so popular "Snocap", which was supposed to be the saving grace to musicians on Myspace, in my utter opinion has flopped, so has I-tunes! When on average the general ipod owner only purchases 15 songs a year, that's less than one album. Yet oddly enough, the average user listens to more than 900 songs a year and in certain demographics exponentially more. Have you ever seen an Ipod with only 15 songs in it? Neither have I. They got the music somewhere, and I truly doubt that all of it was purchased. Why is this okay? Where in society can you walk in and rip something off and say well Im a fan, I need to have this song. Its not stealing. Yes, it is.

My research shows that common users dont want to buy music, they want it free, at least in digital form. If they really like the band, they will purchase CD's and if they really really like the song, they will download it from I-Tunes which has the largest market share of Digital downloads even though I mentioned how troubling the statistics really are. Of course the user would rather buy the hard copy, since its tangible. But even then, most artists find it troubling to get on to I-tunes, while others have discovered Tunecore.com which basically resells its memebership to I-Tunes to artist who could not be approved by I-Tunes originally.

When someone hears a bands music on commercial radio, most users never stop to think about the support that artist is getting, and the studios, the mixing engineers, the mastering engineers, the lawyers, labels, publicist, managers, and every other person who makes a successful artist commercial.

The ad supported model promotes that people listen to the songs and the advertisement just like you an I watch Television. The radio stations long ago addressed the issue of providing royalty to artists for their content. Why should the internet be any different? For far too long, the music industry has been held hostage by illegal piracy and users demanding that the business either give it away for free, let them listen for free, or something that doesn't involve the user shelling out dollars for the entertainment that the artist provides. Apparently, some where along the way it has become socially acceptable that artists do it for the music, which believe it or not they do in part. However, music comes with an economical and realistic price tag. "There aint no such thing as a free lunch", Whereas, if the artist is not earning a living off its endeavors, it is forced to work day jobs, release less content, and be protective of everything it gives to the user and or listener. Additionally, labels are signing less and less artists to their rosters, for fear of failure, losses towards piracy, and only signing artist whom have spammed millions of people to get their rankings up. Without a new model like the one proposed , Studios like that on Gearslutz will suffer greatly in the long run. Artist like myself will be screwed....

:)
Devon Drake

[Bob Olhsson]

Common users don't consider most music worth buying. Professional music is by definition music that a lot of people consider well worth buying.


Free music only raises the bar for what people consider to be extraordinary enough to be worth buying.

[drakewire]

Your logic is flawed.... Most would consider the beatles worth buying... But type in there music on any p2p sharing site and get the whole catalog...

Piracy by virtue does not care whether or not it was recorded professionally or sounds like crap... Just so long as the user doesnt have to pay.... So find me one act out there that has not been bootlegged, its exactly the opposite, those that are worth stealing are the ones that have true market demand...

I say we must make an example out of a couple of these pirates, send them to prison for twenty years. Make it really well known that if your caught, you will do prison time, and I think magically people will begin to start to realize what "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED" really means...
:)~

[ALL*MYTEE]

Too little too late, IMO.

They've got to --gasp-- raise prices.

Make more money=raise prices. There might be a lot of huffing and puffing until this becomes clear. But it doesn't matter how they collect it--they'll have to get more of it. I don't know why there's so much effort put into trying to disguise it.

[BevvyB]

Bob -

When the radio plays commercials it knows YOU will like in the breaks, it won't be like that. And that is where we're headed. That is, if the radio isn't already playing what it knows you like already..