MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT #55

Power Reading for Busy Music Professionals

Hope you're hungry!

MUSIC BIZ INSIGHT is published for musicians, songwriters, managers, label reps, booking agents, entertainment attorneys, studio owners, music publishers, and all others involved in the music business. Its purpose is to help boost your business, find new markets, make the right connections, develop professionally, work smarter and improve your bottom line.

As a general rule, the most successful people in life are those who have the best information.

—Benjamin Disraeli

Written and published bimonthly by Peter Spellman, Director of

MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS: Turning Music Business Data into Useful Knowledge.

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IN THIS ISSUE — MBI#55:

NEWS & VIEWS U CAN USE: MUSIC, THE KILLER APP…THE BITTERSWEET NETWORK…CREATIVE DOWNTIME…SONIC WALLPAPER…CROSS-BRED INNOVATION…
ILLUMINATING TRIVIA

NEWS & VIEWS U CAN USE

MUSIC, THE KILLER APP

"Music has really become the killer application," said Don Mattrick, a Microsoft senior vice president, who runs the company's Xbox business.

Music genre games accounted for 16 percent of U.S. video game software sales in 2007 and comprised a staggering 44 percent of last year's software sales growth, according to research from investment bank UBS Securities.

THE BITTERSWEET NETWORK

"The real winner so far from the internet revolution is clearly the consumer; it is improving choice and introducing huge competition for every pound spent, but in the meantime disrupting retail, education, travel, finance and almost any industry you care to mention. Nowhere is this more true than in the entertainment business. The music industry has been rapidly revolutionised Ð arguably too rapidly Ð eroding the traditional distribution model impacting on careers and shareholder value. Consumers around the world are downloading more music than ever, yet over 80 per cent of it is not paid for. Piracy Ð or criminality, to those of us who occupy the real world Ð has almost killed the golden 'creative' goose". (Ashley MacKenzie, The Independent, 8/25/08)

CREATIVE DOWNTIME

Instead of laying off people when business was lacking, Chris Wallace asked them to fill the void with their own creative ventures, reports Simona Covel in the Wall Street Journal (7/24/08).

Chris just told his people that as long as they made client work their top priority, they were free to pursue personal projects during any downtime. The surprise was that the company, the SuperGroup, is now using some of these "personal projects to help win new clients and expand the work it does with existing clients. " Chris says the concept works because his company is small (just 15 employees and $3 million in revenue) and everybody knows what everybody's outside interests are anyway." A larger organization wouldn't have that intimate knowledge," says Chris.

Interestingly, the company has managed to bring a certain discipline to its special brand of workaday chaos by holding twice-weekly meetings, during which "the whole staff gathers to discuss both company business and personal projects." Chris admits that he sometimes has to remind staffers "that clients come first" but he also notes that the policy "engenders loyalty and hard work." At least one brand has benefited from SuperGroup's creative subculture. The Weather Channel was looking for an agency to create "an interactive website to promote its winter ski forecasts." The Weather Channel was doubtful about SuperGroup because they hadn't written or produced music for any of their clients. So Chris gave them a CD of original music written and produced by its employees on their own time. Not only did they win the business, it was also a real morale boost for the house musicians. "I jumped at the chance to put my music in front of anybody," says Elliott Rothman, whose music and guitar playing ended up being used for the Weather Channel site.

SONIC WALLPAPER

You may not recognize the name "Daniel Powter," but there's no denying that his international megahit song, "Bad Day", has come to soundtrack our lives like sonic wallpaper, reports Alan Connor in BBC News Magazine.

The obvious question is, why? It couldn't be because the lyrics sound "like they've been translated from a foreign language, possibly by a computer." Sure, it was used as the farewell song to failed American Idol contestants. But even that unlikely circumstance begs for an explanation, which, yes, seems to reveal itself in a perfect storm of words, music and ... well ... who knows what? "It's got one of those three- or four-word lyrics that means something to everyone's everyday life," offers Russell Hier of Sony BMG. "No one wants a bad day, but everyone has one." The words, meanwhile, are suitably vague. As Alan Connor observes: "Examine the lyrics, and it's by no means the worst day anyone's ever had. The 'you' of the song queues for some takeaway coffee, kicks around some leaves, sees some gray skies ... and, in the chorus, 'you go for a ride.' Apart from that, the listener knows very little about 'you' and why your day is bad. You could be young or old, single or married, male or female." You could be ... Chris Daughtry. As for the tune itself, like most pop songs it's pretty simple. "You've got to be quite simply structured," explains Brian Kelly of Soundlounge, a music consulting firm. "Something that it doesn't take long for your ear to grasp -- you only have 30 or 40 seconds to make your impact." Daniel Powter himself has his own theory: "It's about phonics," he says. "It's about words that I sing great. I was mumbling something and those words came out." He also said that the song's success "spread slowly like some horrible seeping virus -- like bird flu."

CROSS-BRED INNOVATION

The greatest opportunity for innovation today is in combining dissimilar products, write Michael Gibbert and David Mazursky in The Wall Street Journal. Michael, of Bocconi University, and David, of Hebrew University, think that too many brands make the mistake of trying to innovate within their own categories, resulting in incremental innovation at best and feature glut at worst, culminating in products that are actually less useful. It's better, they say, to look into "cross-breeding" with "dissimilar and even highly remote product categories to spark the conception of a truly new product." "For example," they write, "DeLonghi SpA and Kenwood Corp. produce a stylish radio-toaster ... LG Electronics Inc. has launched the fridge-TV and a glucose meter-phone -- a cell phone with a built-in glucose meter for diabetics." Perhaps most famously, Apple and Nike have collaborated to create a sneaker-iPod for joggers. In some cases, such hybrids may barely rise above the level of novelty, but in the Nike/iPod example, the iPod doesn't just enable the runner to listen to music, but also "displays information about the number of miles run, the pace and calories burned. There is also a feature that with one click allows the runner to play a 'power song,' a personal favorite that can help summon up a burst of energy." Similarly, LG's glucose-phone not only uses the phone's technology to display results of a glucose test, it "can even automatically send the results via text message to caregivers." The hard part, of course, is looking "beyond apparent incompatibilities of highly remote products to identify possible matching points." Michael and David's advice is "to observe what other main product is involved in your product's usage or consumption and how the two can be beneficially combined." Think about how product functions could be modified when combined, and how to create dependencies between those functions. The resulting innovations, they say, can "seem disarmingly obvious in retrospect and make one wonder why no one thought of them before." How can you flip, reverse, turn inside out, or unusually combine YOUR products and services

Source: MarketingHub.com

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))) ILLUMINATING TRIVIA (((

DID YOU KNOW…

Little Richard, who sometimes used to play on the same bill as them at the Star Club, was offered 50 percent of the Beatles in 1962, but admits he turned them down because he couldn't see how they would make it to the big time. Ouch!

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About the Publisher

PETER SPELLMAN is Director of MUSIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS, a business and marketing consultancy to the music industry, and Director of Career Development at Berklee College of Music, Boston. He is the author of several books for music entrepreneurs and teaches music industry courses at Northeastern University (Boston) and the University of Massachusetts (Lowell).

A musician since he was ten, Peter continues to spin riddims in the improvisational collective, Friend Planet and sing Cat Stevens' songs to his kids every night before bed.

BLOOM WHERE YOU'RE PLANTED!

Quote of the Month

Cloud nine gets all the publicity, but cloud eight actually is cheaper, less crowded and has a better view.

— George Carlin, 1937-2008, RIP