Everything fast shortens the length of your ultimate time on stage. Every endorsement, every sponsorship, takes years off your career, just like smoking takes years off your life. Your audience needs to believe that THEY own you, not the man. That if you’re beholden to ANYBODY, it’s them!

Metallica == Microsoft (closed, proprietary systems, active disdain for customers)
Radiohead == Apple (just works, listens to customers)
Trent Reznor == Linux (totally hackable, but can be tricky to configure)

We’ve always wanted to find a simple way to deliver Pandora as a desktop application — it’s probably been on our to do list longer than any single feature. Today we’re dipping our toe into those waters for the first time with the release of a Beta version of Pandora Desktop.

Grab it here!

One hit wonders and pop longevity
The Whitburn Project

What is the Whitburn Project? From Andy:

For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.

Of particular interest to me is “issue number 11“, as is suggested in the comments section of the post: Patronage.

Music patronage is an idea that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about for a number of years, and perhaps its time is coming. There’s certainly a few startups taking a crowdfunding or micro-financing approach to creating music: Sell A Band, Artist Share, and the slightly mysterious, stealth project from Throwing Muses singer, CASH Music, to name a few. An informative round up on these, and other similar services can be found in this great post by Peter Spellman.

As a tangent, I can’t help but contrast historical music patronage (wealthy lords and land owners in a Feudal society hiring court musicians), with modern day licensing deals (Britteny Spears singing for Pepsi). Many individuals have suggested an analogy between the Corporation and the Feudal Estate. Perhaps then, massive, contemporary music licensing deals are simply the inflated version of a very old practice.

The panel I moderated was great fun, and we looked at all sorts of technical issues one faces when developing a “music2.0″ site. Tom Conrad had all kinds of great stories about scaling Pandora. Shaun Haber from Warner Bros. did an admirable job filling in for Ethan Kaplan , earning him the dubious nick name “Virtual Ethan”. In the audience, personal hero Derek Sivers told the story of his journey from php to rails, and back again. Paul Lamere took some notes as well, for those interested. All in all, very enjoyable time spent.

There were many great comments floating around throughout the day, but a one that stuck out in my mind was Michael Petricone stating that:

“IP is like chocolate cake. A little can be good, but too much… look out.”

I’ve also been thinking about Tim Westergren from Pandora who suggests that every four piece rock band should get a 5th member whose primary role is to act as blogger, videographer, and online marketing ace, working all the social media sites. Truly good advice, in my opinion.

Corey Denis had an interesting panel on the new music economy, in which part of the panel was devoted to coming up with a new wikipedia entry for the term “new music economy”. Nothing like some panel participation to get things going.

I also had a few good conversations about Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” fiasco with conference attendees, but the best description of the whole ugly mess is written by Mark Pilgram in a post entitled “the day the music died“. It’s a spectacular story of a truly epic fail. There’s many lessons in there - of what *not* to do.

Thanks Brian! Looking forward to next time.

I have the pleasure to moderate a “tech talk” panel at 1:00pm on building music related web apps with:

• Tom Conrad - Pandora
• Marc Urbaitel - In Ticketing
• Ethan Kaplan - Warner Bros.
• Jack Moffitt - Chesspark / Xiph
• Jeremy Riney - Playlist.com

Lessons learned from last SF Music Summit: Easy on the soju cocktails…

Should be a blast, and I hope to see you all there.

• Titanic - $600,788,188 (1997)
• Star Wars - $460,998,007 (1977)
• Shrek 2 - $441,226,247 (2004)
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial - $435,110,554 (1982)
• Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - $431,088,301 (1999)

So Grand Theft Auto just grossed more in it’s first week, then Star Wars has (domestically) since it’s release in 1977? Sure that’s some big numbers, but the game probably cost a fortune to make right? Grand Theft Auto is rumored to be the most expensive video game ever produced, with estimates nearing the $100 million mark. But films are not cheap to make either of course. Consider the 5 most costly films:

• Titanic (1997) - $200,000,000
• Waterworld (1995) - $175,000,000
• Armageddon (1998) - $140,000,000
• Lethal Weapon (1998) - $140,000,000
• Godzilla (1998) - $125,000,000

So while Grand Theft Auto still has a ways to go to catch up the highest world grossing film (The Titanic at $1,834,779,000), it also cost half as much to produce, and has only been out for one week.

The moral of the story? Start a video game company now.

As CD’s are on their way (quickly) to cultural irrelevance, Live Nation is on a tear signing up artists for deals linked to merchandising and tour dollars - one of the areas in the music industry that is experiencing growth (live nation revenues grew 12.8% last year).

In even bigger news, top grossing touring act The Rolling Stones are rumored to be in discussions with Live Nation. The Stones contract with EMI comes up for renewal this summer.

Slightly unsettling is the emergence of a new monopolistic gate keeper in the Music Industry. Nothing new, of course…

Update: Jay-Z just signed up with Live Nation too, for $150 million!
Quote:

“I’ve turned into the Rolling Stones of hip hop.”

Nice…

Standout quote:

Keith: Apparently, I do have an incredible immune system. I had hepatitis C and cured it by myself.
Q: How?
Keith: Just by being me.