Google Play’s “All Access” Hitting a High Note with the Industry

The long-awaited on-demand subscription music service from Google, “Google Play Music All Access” finally launched on May 15 at the company’s I/O conference in San Francisco, reported Tech Crunch. With versions for the Web and mobile devices, it presents millions of instantly-playable songs, charts and playlists, instant radio stations and recommendations for the same price as Spotify Premium ($9.99).

News of the release leaked first on The Verge, when reporters from the site found out Google had signed licensing deals with all major record labels. Google initially launched its Google Play music locker service in 2011.

Google’s due diligence at building relationships with those in the music industry as it launched All Access has made it very popular with label heads. But Richard Waters and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the Financial Times wondered last week whether All Access will be enough to overcome the past problems Google has had getting along the music industry and to build a real audience that is willing to pay out of its gigantic user base.   

One detail that will help its cause is that Google has, according to sources, agreed to make all payments up front for licensing. Apple has not yet included this type of promise in any of its proposed deals for its potentially upcoming iRadio service. And an unnamed music industry executive said another problem between Apple and labels is a disagreement over whether Apple should still have to pay if a listener wants to skip over tracks.

All Access has found a creative way around skipping that benefits labels and users. Listeners can pick a specific song they like and create an entire “station” made up of similar music. Then they can view the upcoming tracks on the playlist, reorganize and skip to their hearts’ content. Pandora’s monthly premium service costs $6 less per month than Google Play and does not offer this type of flexibility.

The music industry is also pleased that Google is not trying to out price its competitors. While it is offering a limited-time offer of $7.99 per month for All Access (until June 30), it will eventually be the same price as Spotify Premium. Google’s philosophy is that if it uses a business model similar to Spotify and taps into Google’s huge user base, it will be able to make subscription music services more popular. The IFPI recently reported that subscriptions now make up 20 percent of the digital music market in Europe and just 10 percent globally.  

One industry executive said that there are still those in the music industry that are skeptical as to whether Google’s subscription service will succeed:  “It’s Google, so you have to take it seriously. It’s kind of down to the service itself – how user friendly and intuitive it is, and how they market it. They have a mixed record in that regard. Google Play has been OK but has not been a game changer. The brand Google doesn’t have a great association with music.”

The Music Industry:  Ready for the Mobile Boom?

Has the music industry really noticed how popular mobile music has become? And is it ready to respond? This is a question Marcus Taylor, founder of the digital music marketing company Venture Harbour asked after analyzing the recent changes in his and other music fans’ listening habits in an article posted on The Music Void.

Taylor looked at the analytics for his own company website and realized that since the beginning of 2013, one-quarter of his traffic had come from mobile devices, whereas two years ago, mobile traffic made up only six or seven percent.

With potentially one in four fans or customers coming into websites through a mobile device, his opinion is, the music industry may not be taking the world’s steady shift towards mobile devices seriously.

He searched various brands, artists, labels and other music companies across the Web using his mobile devices and discovered that most have not yet built up mobile-friendly environments. Many of the world’s biggest bands, instrument manufacturers and music stores still have not figured out how to create a mobile experience that caters to the needs of mobile customers.

Taylor said, there are a lot of low-cost and simple options for anyone that wants to build up a friendlier mobile presence. Companies, bands and labels can just make a few simple coding changes to their existing website. They can also redirect users coming in from a mobile device to a mobile-optimized version of the website (the technique used by companies like Gibson and Music Job Board).

And Taylor wondered, with stats increasingly and quite obviously pointing to the huge growth of the mobile market, “What are we waiting for … Do we need 50% of our traffic to come from mobile for it to become a worry? Do we need to double check that this isn’t a phase?”

Warner Music Group Finally in the Black

Warner Music Group Corp. finally reported a profit for the first time since 2008 on May 14, revealed the Associated Press. The label houses artists such as The White Stripes and Blake Shelton and attributed its success to benefits from increased digital music sales.

The label’s latest turnaround could also present further evidence that the recorded music industry is finally recovering from the tailspin it has been in for more than ten years.

Net income reported in Warner Music’s second quarter ending on March 31 was $2 million. Last year at this time, it experienced a $36 million loss. The last profit posted by the company was $23 million, in the quarter ending December 2008.

Revenue at Warner was up eight percent, climbing to $675 million. And digital revenue increased by 20 percent. The percentage of revenues from digital sales from sources, including digital download stores and streaming services, was up by almost four percent.

CD sales have gone down by over 50 percent since their highest point at 2000, which contributed to the same cut in industry-wide revenue.

Warner Music also renegotiated its debt interest in November, which could have helped nurture its latest profit. Because the company still has publicly-traded debt, it must release its financial results each quarter.

But I am going to be brutally honest:  There are a lot of terribly-written artist bios out there – bios that are so ridiculous that I can’t hear the music over the sound of my own laughter (or uncontrollable sobbing). And your band bio might fit into this category. You may even know your bio is embarrassingly bad, but feel either totally overwhelmed by the prospect of writing about yourself, or simply too lazy to make changes. Maybe you are just unaware that a well-written bio is the most crucial piece of your written marketing materials and that it will be seen (and in most cases, harshly judged) by event promoters, magazine, newspaper and blog editors, venue owners, industry professionals and potential fans. Regardless of the reason you are not investing any energy into your bio, what the f&*k are you thinking?

Our rapidly-evolving technological world has made both computers and the Internet accessible to almost everyone. And, in my opinion as a professional writer deeply in love with the wonderful nuances of words, that has led to one of the most nightmarish consequences of the Digital Age– a consequence that has profoundly affected the way people write about themselves:  The Internet has evolved into an untended wilderness, where everyone is encouraged to vomit out (completely unedited) thoughts no one cares about, all over a global audience. Thanks to fully-accessible blogging platforms, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging and a variety of other tools that give all of us permission to speak like 13-year-old girls and casually throw the beauty of proper language and grammar under the bus (and then run over it several times to make sure it is truly dead), there is a very blurry line between “some notes and unfinished thoughts to get me started on writing my bio along with some stuff I like about myself, which occurred to me in the shower this morning” and “my polished, professional bio, which I will proudly use to present myself as a serious person and artist.”

If you have writer’s block, or are not sure your bio is working in its current form, here are some of the bio f&*k-ups that I see regularly lead to the most abysmally-written bios. If you can avoid these, you’re on the right track.

1.  “And when I was five, I invented the piano.”

Were you kicking along to the beat of music while you were in the womb? Did you start playing the violin at age three? And were you also making up sophisticated songs about your oatmeal in 13/8 time at the breakfast table and singing them into your spoon to the delight of your parents and jealous dismay of your talentless siblings? If you can answer these questions with a confident “Yes” (and you are not currently a child), then allow me to hand deliver a message to you:  No one cares.

If you are an adult, your child prodigy years are of no real interest to anyone that will be reading your bio. Mentioning how amazing you were as a child will also encourage someone to gauge how far you’ve come since then, look at the state of your current career (or lack of career) and perhaps even think, “Wow, that’s too bad … what happened?” Plus, a childhood ability to easily pick up instruments and comprehend elements of harmony and melody is not a unique selling point for your story as an artist, because it is something that is shared by a majority of your contemporaries. Briefly celebrating the earliest environment that nurtured your talent can offer an introduction to you. But you need to connect with that moment you decided to pursue your art seriously and made the grown-up decision to turn it into your life’s work and illustrate the thrill of that decision as part of your bio. That is likely where your real adventure began.

2. “Since the beginning of time, there has never been a better singer writing more wonderful lyrics than [insert name of the best singer in the world here].”

Are you the best bass player that ever lived? Do you love to write beautiful songs more than any other unique songwriter? Are your varied influences as a guitarist pretty damn eclectic – more eclectic than anyone who has ever written songs that might be compared to yours? Well, who the hell do you think you are … (and while I’m asking, what exactly are you trying to say, anyway?)

During one of my recent bio-writing workshops at an art school, I shared my pet peeve of bios that make grandiose, assertive, clichéd statements that are not supported by any hard evidence (or by any truly descriptive adjectives or cliché-free phrases). One of the students said, “Yeah. You can only do that if you are Prince.” While I would argue that even Prince should not make obnoxiously-grandiose statements about himself, he probably has. And he can only get away with it because of his lengthy track record of proving his competency as a musician and performer and his “unique”ness as an artist, the unquestionably-loyal fan base he has built and the countless reviews he has received from reputable industry experts saying he is a pioneer in his field (and clearly explaining why).

Look at your own bio. Does it humbly describe the sound and feel of your music using tangible adjectives that conjure up a taste, a texture or even a smell (though hopefully not an unpleasant one) that someone that neither plays nor composes music can understand? Does it capture how your music makes your fans feel? And if the tone is a little cocky, do you have some real press quotes from legitimate online or print publications (and not My Mom magazine) to back up that attitude? Yes? Great … now prove it! (Also, might I remind you that there are only 12 notes; get over yourself.)

And as a real-world example to illustrate the point of this particular f&*k-up, here is a bio an artist friend of mine recently asked me to critique. His name and location have been changed for his and your protection (and yes, he fixed it!):

“Flibberty Giblet is a walking contradiction. He is a singer-songwriter, but he has very little in common with most singer-songwriters of today. His tableau of jagged sound stands out like a sore thumb against the airier tones of the Atlantis folk scene in which he thrives. But as dark as his jumbled and oft-disturbing lyrics can be, his melodies are every bit as gorgeous.”

3.  “Thanks for describing the water while I’m drowning.”

This may sound unbending, maybe even impossible, but your bio has to get to the point before the first word. (And this f&*k-up is actually an outgrowth of f&*k-up #2.) If the first few words of your bio do not immediately start setting the stage for your narrative, and if your name does not appear in the first sentence, you have already failed. I hold pretty solidly to the guideline that the longest a bio should ever be is somewhere around 750 words (1,000 if you have a creative purpose that necessitates more words and moves the narrative along compellingly). And ideally, this 750-word masterpiece should be an “opt-in” after you have presented a short-form, 250-word bio first and that short introduction piqued further interest. People reading about you have thousands of other artists to read about and even more music to hear, so you have no room to go on long-winded tangents or define the words you are using to talk about yourself.

Sometimes when an artist is particularly blocked about the details that make his/her story worth following, I ask for some examples of music bios that the person enjoys reading, just to get a feel for style and give that person some inspiration. A very young R&B artist I worked with a couple years ago on a bio went through this exercise and sent me a few bios of fairly big hip hop and R&B artists. I was shocked to find that each one of them was worse than the one before it (and even more shocked to find that these bios had come from professional writers). The common problem amongst all of them was the amount of words that were wasted on “posturing” and desperately trying to convince me that the artist was “the best of all time.” Sometimes, the bios spent several sentences or even a paragraph defining a word used, like in the case of this bio, which started with a dictionary-style definition before it even identified the artist it was talking about:

“Natural can be described as innate or instinctive in essence, disposition or temperament. Quite simply, natural can be summed up as God-given or God-inspired because it comes so easily.” (Wow, that is quite simply put! I always wondered what “natural” meant. Thanks so much! Now, what if I don’t believe in God? And, wait … wasn’t I reading an artist bio?)

Present yourself and your music as objectively as possible, then respectfully let readers draw their own conclusions. You won’t make lifelong friends (aka, build a fan base that will support you for life) by strong-arming someone into liking you.

4.  “We’re all with the band.”
It is human nature to wonder about the names, birthdays, hometowns and sexual orientations of all the members of your favorite band. It is also human nature not to know the name of the bass player (and not to care enough to even consider asking).

The tendency for a lot of bands when crafting their bios is to ask each member to put together a resume which includes details like education, past bands and other accomplishments, likes and dislikes and then throw all these resumes together to create a total frenzy of information that is ultimately irrelevant to the current band’s mission and music.

While you certainly want to give your fans and others some personal details about you and your band mates, so you can get them invested in your success, the bio needs to have a focused story and purpose. Start your band’s tale with why and how you came together as a group. How are you connected to each other, and why do you make melodic, ugly, dark, dirty, gritty or [insert a description of your sound and sensibilities here] music together? Save your pet peeves, favorite colors and favorite place to eat cheese for a blog post.

5.  “My name is Sybil … no, wait! It’s Gertrude.”

If I ever butt heads with an artist while writing a bio, this fifth f&*k-up is the one we most often disagree about:  Having multiple professional bios that serve different purposes. Succeeding in the music industry involves a lot of diversifying, and while possible, it is still a rare privilege to make a sustainable living playing your own music. To make ends meet and support a still-growing career, many artists must take up jobs as session players, songwriters for other artists, etc. I sometimes work with artists who are either afraid their persona as a solo artist (or a band leader) is not “professional” enough to get them work in other areas of the industry or just think their roles are so all over the place that they are not connected enough to put together; thus, they want to create several different bios in order to present each of the different “hats” they wear.

I understand the feeling of needing to pay respect to each of your different personae as well as the fear of publicly embracing all the different aspects of your very-diversified artist career. But multiple personality disorder is no fun for anybody. When you cannot find one way to celebrate your many different dimensions, you are communicating exactly the opposite of what you want to communicate to potential employers or collaborators. Instead of saying, “I am 100-percent committed to working hard at making music in all its forms, and I have a deep skill set that reaches into many different areas of the music business,” when you have many different bios, you are basically saying, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, so I’m just doing a bunch of stuff to see what sticks.” Or even worse than that, you are saying, “I will be whoever you want me to be,” which will invite some pretty unsavory and counter-productive characters into your world.

As satisfied and refreshed I feel after reading a beautifully-written bio that invites me into an artist’s rich, inner world, I feel that much more physically and spiritually ill when I find one that misses the mark. Hopefully the above can help you find a direction for your own writing process. If you are still struggling, reach out to your friends (or even your fans!) for feedback. And remember, there is no shame in hiring a professional bio writer!

Top Ten Music Apps Hitting Record Numbers

74 million people are now actively using the top 10 music applications on Facebook, according to analytics and metrics tool metricsmonk. Last year at this time, music apps on Facebook had 56 million monthly active users (MAU). The Rdio app alone has grown to seven times its original size as streaming services start to add more personalized features.

Users of the top five music apps alone total 61 million MAU. And half of these users are directly tied to Spotify, which recently announced it will be offering services in Asia, Latin America and several other new markets. The app doubled its number of Facebook users in the past year.

Pandora lost some users in the middle of 2012 and has continued to fall, though now the service has evened out at about eight million MAU, almost exactly the same number as SoundCloud and less than half of the 18 million users it had last year.

Other apps, such as the French streaming music service Deezer have fared incredibly well, tripling its user numbers since last year and almost catching up to Pandora. Radio app iHeartRadio doubled its users to four million.  

The most significant user growth has been experienced by Rdio, which is now part of the new Twitter Music, along with Spotify. The ad-free music service created by Skype founders has increased its monthly active user base by 700 percent since launching in 2010.   

Music streaming apps have been heading towards more personalization over the past year, as evidenced by services like Songza, which custom-creates playlists and song choices according to users’ moods. The company acquired $3.8 million in funding in April in order to support an upgrade of its iOS app. Spotify also recently took hold of Tunigo, an app similar to Songza and 8tracks, an app that creates personalized playlists.

Cashing in on the Sound Recording Investor Tax Credit

Both local and national musicians have been heading to Louisiana to cash in on the Sound Recording Investor Tax Credit program, reported New Orleans TV news station WWLTV early last week. The program gives artists who choose to record in Louisiana a 25-percent rebate on eligible expenses for projects that cost above $15,000.

The Sound Recording Investor Tax Credit initiative was created in 2005 and covers studio fees, session musicians and in some cases travel for out-of-state musicians. Philip Mann, Louisiana’s director of live performance and music industry development said artists of all sizes and experience levels are taking advantage:  “The Rebirth Brass Band used it for their last record and they won the Grammy, and we’ve had some major artists like the Dave Matthews Band and of course a lot of local artists who are at Jazz Fest right now.”

R.E.M., the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Trombone shorty have all used the program. And those working behind the glass at studios – producers, sound engineers and many others – are also benefiting as more money comes into their businesses.

Irvin Mayfield, a jazz trumpeter and band leader said the tax credit program is essential to providing a solid infrastructure for the music business in Louisiana, a state which produces music that is celebrated worldwide:  “All these incentives help us build a thriving economy and industry around music … We’ve been the ones who have been creating the music for the last 300 years. However, we’ve seen these other cities pop up with recording studios, publishing groups – things centered around the business aspect of the music – and we haven’t really put enough time, enough investment in that infrastructure of the business.”

While the recording tax credits currently max out at $3 million annually, Mayfield said artists and others hold out hope that the current legislative session in Baton Rouge won’t result in cuts to the program. And Mayfield added, in the meantime, officials continue to reach out to artists in order to share the exciting benefits of recording in Louisiana. “This is something that, in the state and obviously the city of New Orleans, people have been really eyeing for a while — growth in the music industry … Dollars, dollars, dollars is the story of the tax. We want to keep those things moving. We wanna keep the explosion happening.”

Inconsistent Metadata:  The Cause of Music Business Struggles?

Attendees discussed issues surrounding the analysis and use of metadata at NARM’s first-ever Music Biz conference in Los Angeles. And one of the topics discussed was their surprise that it took 15 years of digital distribution to put together a conference on metadata, which they argue is still one of the major issues hindering music industry growth, said Billboard.  

Rightscom co-founder Mark Isherwood argued that before the Digital Age, royalties had been freely flowing to publishers from labels and radio since copyright laws were established. In his panel on “efficiency and transparency in royalty reporting,” he questioned why digital music suddenly changed policies.  

Licensing streaming music involves both mechanical rights and performance rights, which has led to major issues in the U.S. Music users can get performance licenses from BMI, ASCAP or SESAC, yet they have to go to individual labels to give them the appropriate publisher data in order to get licenses that allow them to properly pay these publishers. Collection societies do all the licensing in almost every other country worldwide.

And another issue is that publisher data obtained from labels is often inconsistent and in many cases totally inaccurate. Thanks to this problem, entire companies have been formed to offer support, such as Music Reports Inc., MediaNet and Harry Fox’s Slingshot.

Rob Weitzner, the head of Consolidated Independent North American said, “The biggest challenge of any organization or music service in trying to pay royalties is the quality of the data supplied by content owners … Our challenge is ‘no garbage in’ so we don’t have to worry about garbage out.” Because, he added, only high-quality data can be properly tracked.

And even PROs have faced challenges getting paid properly so they can dole out payments to songwriters and publishers. ASCAP VP of new media technology Matt DeFilippis shared, “If it plays in the digital environment, it has to be discoverable and payable, which is a noble ambition that requires ASCAP to traverse a lot of hurdles to find and make a payout on every single performance.”

ASCAP requires content owners to provide data in a very specific format and provide audio with each song registration. But musical cues in films and television present major issues. DeFilippis said, “They have all kinds of musical cues and you could have happy cue No. 1 through happy cue No. 49,999.”

Part of the solution to this problem in the digital world is fingerprinting and monitoring of service, radio and television from companies like Media Monitors, Soundmouse and Competitrack. Defilippis revealed, “In the old world, we did cumbersome things including teams of people wearing headphones and listening to thousands of hours of television and radio programming.” But proxies were used for what was playing in bars and clubs. ASCAP now uses technology almost exclusively to make sure reporting is accurate so payments can be sent.

Music Reports Inc. senior VP of business affairs and business development Les Watkins said his company uses data and technology whenever possible. However, “we still have about 30 people doing copyright research. They do what they can through the Internet, then make sure to contact people, because, Watkins added, “You still need the human element.”

Weitzner stated he feels that labels should be required to offer up “better quality metadata:”  “We began to address that by letting our clients know through flags when something is wrong and it needs to be fixed … When we began to block content so that it wasn’t serviced to digital services, we started to get better quality metadata.”

It’s amazing to me how musicians are all over every latest update on Facebook and Twitter but often forget about using YouTube as a social network. That’s not to say that they don’t use the platform to upload videos and share them on their website and other social media profiles. But a vast majority of musicians forget all about making sure that there is the highest possibility of discovery and a pleasant user experience on the platform itself. Your average musician’s YouTube channel is the digital equivalent of this photo:

Don’t worry! I’m sure the average YouTube user who is exposed to more music videos than he or she can count on an average day will spend untold hours seeking out your cover of Colour me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up” in all that mess.

(As an aside, if you are really covering that song, your YouTube presence is the least of your problems.)

With the above photo (and hopefully not that song) in mind, let’s talk about making sure you are increasing the likelihood of getting found on YouTube.

Making Discovery on YouTube More Likely

Tags and Titles

One of the biggest mistakes artists make on YouTube is not giving any thought to the possibility of discovery. This often starts with poor title choice. You need to make your video titles descriptive and based on what someone (with no personal knowledge of you or your music) would be searching for. No one on YouTube is going to type in “slowjam-ver.3 no vocals recorded in Doug’s basement.”

Your video title should include your band name, the song name, the venue or location (if it’s a live performance) and a few other specific keywords that describe your style and sound. If it is a cover, the artist you are covering’s name and the title of the song should come before your own, because the earlier the keyword is in a title, the more likely it is to populate in search results.

You should also be considering channel and video tags. Tags are keywords that help people find your video when they type in a YouTube search. So, what are fans looking for your video typing into YouTube and Google? If you are a developing artist – chances are they aren’t looking for you (yet), so keep in mind that your project name is only one of several keywords that will help you out. As with video titles, video tags need to include details like venue names, your band name (both correct and incorrect spellings), song names, city, stage, genre, etc. Appropriate tags make it much more likely that you will come up first in a search for your song or band.

To add tags to your YouTube Channel, look at the “Settings” tab.

To add tags to individual videos, click on “Videos” from the drop-down menu at the top right-hand corner of the YouTube page.Then click “edit” next to the video you want to tag.

Oh, and while we are making sure things are well labeled, be sure to link your website and / or other social media profiles and a buy link in your description.

Video Responses

A few more tricks of the trade:  You will notice that when you visit a popular video, there are often video responses. Video responses are basically a comment on someone else’s video that uses one of your videos as the reply. On very popular videos, these responses won’t always get served up to every viewer on every viewing (because there are usually several responses), but leaving responses does increase the chances of getting traffic from a video that you believe has viewers who will appreciate your content.

Playlists

Similar to video replies, playlists can be used to help your video get stumbled upon more often by viewers who are looking at other videos. Again, you should select videos that you have decided will have a similar audience to your video. It is not uncommon when viewing a video to have a playlist that shares tags with the video you are watching populate on the right hand side. For example, if I am looking at a Pearl Jam video, I notice that the very-poorly-titled “YouTube Mix” populates on the right side. With an even more relevant title like “Favorite Grunge songs” you would increase the chances of discovery when someone clicks on that playlist.

Subscriptions and comments

This is a pretty basic tip for any YouTube user, but you should follow channels of similar artists and interact with their videos. You do not need to make this your life’s work, but it can get people back to your channel if you spend a bit of time each week being aware and participating in the conversation around other videos in your genre. (And an important note:  This strategy works better with mid-sized and not huge acts).

So, there are some ways of increasing your chances of getting discovered on YouTube.  I will be back soon with some tips on making sure your channel is presented in a way that once you are discovered that people don’t run away screaming.

For more tips about using YouTube efficiently to promote your music, you can check out an interview with Roy LaManna, founder and CEO of Trendsetter Media and Marketing:  How to Make a Good YouTube Channel.  

(And feel free to reach out if you are interested in getting a custom YouTube marketing sampler built.)

Compilation Album Sales Booming in the Digital Era

Compilation album sales rose by 7.2 percent in 2012, despite predictions that downloadable music focused increasingly on singles would completely destroy the niche.

The Independent released figures from a study conducted by the British recorded music industry (BPI), which showed the sales increase can be greatly attributed to the popularity of the Now That’s What I Call Music series, currently celebrating its 30^th year. These collections held steady in the Top 3 spots on last year’s compilation charts. And Now That’s What I Call Christmas and Now That’s What I Call Running were close behind at Number 4. In fact, the entire list of albums in theTop-15-best-selling compilations were variations on the Now compilations, which are produced through a partnership between SMI and Universal’s UMTV.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI said that while many in the music business were surprised that 23.5% of compilations bought in 2012 were purchased in downloadable formats, the phenomenon actually makes sense:  “… These albums offer an expert filter – someone has done the work for you by picking the best of the genre.” Total sales of Now collections last year were at 2.9 million, an 11-year high.

Taylor added, the sales increase is also due to the fact that the Now brand is trusted by listeners and also is more affordable than other compilations albums that have 60 tracks or more.

Sales of compilations are already up 11.8 percent this year and currently represent 21% of all albums sold.

AOL Music Closed for Business

The AOL Music news site and its associated properties The BoomBox, The Boot and Noisecreep are now shut down. The immediate closure was announced on April 26 via tweets by Spinner editor Dan Reilly and a host of other surprised employees and reported by sites like CNet and Mashable. Reilly also disclosed that all employees at the four AOL Music outlets had been laid off.   

AOL attempted to break into the digital music arena with a variety of online services over the past decade. In order to get in on the shifting music business, the company picked up Spinner and music tech business Nullsoft for $400 million in 1999.

Thomas Chau, AOL Radio’s program director said that it will continue to operate:  “AOL Radio will continue, but everyone I work with will be unemployed as of today.”

AOL has not yet issued an official statement about the demise of its music news site.

UK Music Research Project to Ask, “How Much is Music Worth?”

British national music trade organization UK Music is gearing up for a new study – the UK Music Project – that will determine how much the music industry contributes to the United Kingdom’s overall economy, according to Music Instrument Professional. The study will mark the first time the music industry’s economy in a single country has been analyzed this closely against its overall economy.    

UK Music protects the interests of the British commercial music industry that includes artists, musicians, songwriters and composers, record labels, music managers, music publishers, studio producers and music licensing organizations.

The Musicians’ Union will also contribute to the project. The group is asking that its members and others within the music industry contribute to help “celebrate” the positive impact they have on the economy.

UK Music stated, the project was motivated by the need to continue to assert the value of the music industry – which has experienced challenges in recent years – and especially the value of its artists:  “Musicians and composers are a crucial part of the music industry. And the music industry is a key growth sector of the UK economy. This importance needs to be measured, documented, and celebrated. UK Music is setting out to do just that in an ambitious research program.”  

The project will set out to accomplish a range of goals: define the parameters of the music industry, measure its size and show specifically how it contributes to the economy; identify risks and opportunities within the music market; track how new services, technologies and legislation has affected the business; get a clear picture of how consumer behavior has changed in recent years.

The report will be presented to the government and published in late 2013. All survey respondents will remain anonymous, and data will be aggregated.

I talked to Mark about the differences between the music mixing and mastering processes and the critical qualities of a “radio-ready” song. He also shared some important advice for artists and producers just starting out who want to build successful, long-lasting careers in music. 

Musician Coaching:

Thanks for taking some time to chat, Mark. How did you get into the music industry?

MC:

I was an artist for a long time and was in a few bands that were signed. At some point, I wanted to get out of that. I ended up opening a restaurant in the East Village in New York City, but got a record deal while I was running it and ended up deciding to sell. I had a little bit of cash left over and wanted to start some kind of small business. And this was back in the day of cassettes, so I bought a business that was doing duplications:  high-quality, real-time cassettes.

I always had a small studio in my house, and I was getting requests from clients to start doing mastering. Initially, I really didn’t even know what that process entailed. But I started doing mastering for these duplication clients – hundreds and hundreds of hours-worth – and realized I really enjoyed it.

The record I did with the band I was in, Thirst, did really well. We toured opening for Radiohead in 1996 and had a couple Top 20 radio songs. It was a lot of fun, but there were a lot of political issues attached to being in a band like that. And our record label, Iguana sold their alternative division to Interscope Records. Our album got caught between the cracks of that transition.

By the time Thirst was getting ready to do its second record, the whole production universe had become more interesting to me than anything else. I decided to go professional with my mastering business and built a production complex over on Lafayette Street, where I decided to “hang out my shingle” and offer my services to the general public. By that time I’d already done a huge quantity of mastering, but none of it had been on a retail level; I had just been doing it for duplication clients.

Since I began my business, the projects have just been getting more and more interesting. We’re now a full-fledged recording studio. When we moved to our new facility, we built a big SSL room upstairs. We also have production suites that we lease out to resident producers. They aren’t affiliated with us in a business context, but synergistically, we share resources. We have quite a few studios:  seven smaller rooms leased out to in-house producers; the SSL room upstairs; my big mastering room. 

When people ask me what my main focus is, I say, “Mastering is my day job and producing is my hobby.” While I usually get paid to produce, mastering is where my heart is.   

Musician Coaching:

I would imagine having the creative energy of all those people in one place really builds the business.

MC:

Yeah. We have seven producers doing their thing. And the manufacturing is still a part of the business. But cassettes have, of course, disappeared, and CDs are becoming less prevalent.

Musician Coaching:

I wanted to talk to you a bit about the mastering process. I’ve been playing bass for 20-some years and have played on a handful of records. I am by no means a first call on an album, but if worse comes to worst, I can hold it down. Still, I admit, I have no clue what the difference is between fine tuning a mix and mastering. 

MC:

There is definitely a tried and true method of making an album, and mastering is the forgotten step; it’s the final piece of the puzzle. Most producers and mix engineers understand that mastering is something they ought to be doing. A lot of people are in the same boat you are in, though:  They don’t really understand what is happening with mastering. I will say that being a mastering engineer has made me a much better mix engineer. And when I mix, I think I get a better understanding of what the mastering process is actually doing to a recording.

Mastering can be kind of hard to explain, and I think that’s why there’s a mystique around it. Mastering engineers listen a little differently from how most people listen. We have different objectives and do different things with the signal flow.

To elaborate on that, when you have a properly-put-together record, the mixing engineer ought to be mixing for actual mix; that person has to make sure the balance between the instruments is correct. At the beginning of audio and recorded music, mix engineers were originally called “balance engineers.” And that’s really what you need to be doing as a mix engineer:  Making sure that the individual musical elements are set up with the right EQ structure and have the right dynamic range, and that the overall mix is pleasing to the ear. What you should not be doing as a mix engineer is mixing for volume. You shouldn’t be trying to make a loud mix or a “present” mix. Those elements are in the domain of the mastering engineer.

I tell people that even if you are going to end up mastering it yourself because of budgetary constraints, you still have to respect the mastering process as part of the record-making process.

Musician Coaching:

I run across a lot of guys who like mixes that are burned almost to the point of clipping, not realizing there is going to be a mastering process to polish everything.

MC:

I’ve seen that myself, and it’s definitely a function of the Digital Age. I tend to blame the salesmen at places like Guitar Center for this. People buy all these plug-ins, because the gear manufacturers are trying to sell people new products they don’t have. But artists end up purchasing tools they don’t really need and then reverse engineer a use for it.

That’s also what has happened to some extent with the mastering plug-ins. If you don’t have the budget to send it to a mastering engineer, having those tools at your disposal can be a good thing. And if you are a working, professional studio owner or mix engineer, many times putting some type of “ghetto mastering” on an album is good so clients can listen to it in the car on the way home and not have it be distant sounding or non-competitive with the other CDs in their CD changer. So, there is an immediate application for some of these tools. I definitely see high-end mix guys doing “quickie” mastering for clients to listen to and reference. But then they keep the un-mastered versions of the songs to send to the real mastering guy later. And that’s actually a fairly smart way to work.

When the mastering guy gets the files, he is concerned with making it radio ready. There are two parameters that determine “radio readiness.” In the digital domain, we have an absolute ceiling that we’re working with: 0 db full scale. The loudness of any project is going to be determined by the average between the average dynamic output and the peak dynamic output. Since we know where the peak is – 0 db full scale – what we’re working with is manipulating that average dynamic output so it can get as close to the peak as is reasonable, so the song is “present” and competitive with other songs on the radio. When the FM transmitters get a hold of the song, we don’t want it to be too brittle, “present” or crispy sounding or to disappear and be inaudible.

The other culturally-defined parameter is the EQ structure. There is no such thing as the “mathematically-correct” amount of high end, or the “mathematically-correct” amount of low end. Those things are all culturally determined. You want to pocket your product in a place where it makes sense to your consumer. If your consumer is used to listening to a certain type of record, then suddenly you give them a record that is incredibly bright in comparison, it will hurt their ears, and they will want to stop listening. On the other hand, if you give them something that is too dark in comparison to what they are used to listening to, they will not be able to hear it.

There is a little bit of strategy and interpretation involved in trying to “pocket” a product, depending on what type of music it is and what the artist is trying to achieve musically and artistically. A good example of this idea is some of the early Kanye West albums. Those were pretty quiet, dark records. He made those choices on purpose, because he wanted his music to inhabit a slightly different space from some of the more aggressive, bright records that were out at the time.           

Musician Coaching:

You’ve been in music for 30 years at this point. And you have an interesting perspective on the business, because you’ve been in a band, toured, recorded and worked behind the glass in a studio. What advice would you give someone just starting out?

MC:

I was always a person who wanted to do things on my own. Musically, when I started out, I followed the punk ethos and have always had a “DIY” mindset in general. Even when I decided to get into engineering, I was more interested in learning how to do things myself than being taught how to do things by someone else. If I were going to give advice to someone like myself, it would be to learn how to listen to other people. I think you have to learn how to weed out the crappy advice and work with the good advice.

As I get further along in my career, I realize there were a lot of people telling me useful things when I was younger. And had I listened to them at the time, I would’ve been much better off. Sometimes when you are concerned with being self-sufficient as an artist, you forget that other people have had experiences and have gone through the process themselves. And some of their advice might be worthwhile. In the Digital Age, where everyone thinks they can buy any application, put it on their laptop and do it all themselves, it’s easy to forget that you really need the experience of other artists and professionals to guide you.

There’s actually not a single record I’ve mastered that hasn’t made me think, “This person would’ve benefitted from a stronger producer.” There are a lot of people I work with who are great artists with solid projects. But if they had used a real producer, a real mix engineer and a real studio instead of doing everything themselves in their mother’s kitchen, they would’ve had a substantially better product.

To learn more about Mark Christensen and his studio work, visit the Engine Room Audio website. You can also follow his business on Facebook and Twitter.