PBS Music Instinct on Indaba Music

Sweet new program launching on Indaba Music today:

The Music Instinct: Science and Song, premiering Wednesday, June 24 at 9:00pm (check local listings), is a ground-breaking program that offers viewers a new understanding of the power of music. Music is found all over the natural world and in everyday life experiences. The documentary follows visionary researchers and accomplished musicians, such as Bobby McFerrin, Yo-Yo Ma, Jarvis Cocker, Evelyn Glennie, and Daniel Barenboim, to the crossroads of science and culture in search of answers to music’s deep and abiding mysteries.

This is a rare opportunity to interact with an exceptionally creative and well-produced program from a respected organization months before its launch. PBS, Thirteen, and the producers of The Music Instinct invite you to interact with this yet-to-be-released program and create your own dynamic musical language from sound effects found in different natural and urban environments around the world.

To help you explore this world of sound, PBS and Thirteen are providing you with 207 sounds from their own library, each recorded in pristine quality. To qualify for the contest, you must use a minimum of four of the sounds provided (although we encourage you to use more). While original recorded melodies or other material can be used in generating a composition for the contest, all compositions will be judged on the originality and expressiveness of the rhythmic and harmonic use of the sound clips provided.

Head over to Indaba and check it out!

Forging Authentic Connections with Fans

Ok, so I confess that until about a year ago I had never heard of Deerhoof. A few of the guys at Indaba first introduced me to them…and I must say they’re definitely one of the most talented, musically innovative bands out there. Some of their stuff is a bit over my head (sometimes I have simple tastes

This however, I totally get: Deerhoof has decided to launch a featured session on Indaba Music, in which they’re inviting Indaba members and fans to re-imagine their new song “Buck and Judy”. It’s not a contest, there’s no prize – it’s just a great band collaborating with other musicians and fans. So cool.

From the session:

Part 1. Deerhoof’s offering a sheet music arrangement of “Buck and Judy”, as well as tabs showing exactly how Deerhoof played the two guitar parts and bass part. This way you can play parts of the song yourselves, replace one of the instruments or add a new one. When you’re ready, add your contribution to the tracks section. 

Part 2. Deerhoof has already uploaded the drums, bass, two guitars, piano, and vocal from their recording of the song. Use any combination of the uploaded stems (from Deerhoof or any other Indaba member) to create your version of the song. Post the finished version to the mixdown section! 

That’s it for my shameless plug; now on to the point. Over at Indaba we think about artist marketing A LOT, and we often run marketing programs for major artists, as we’ve done for Mariah Carey, The Roots, and many others. We work with our clients to make those campaigns musically interesting, organic, and engaging (and huge opportunities for exposure among participants), but they can still be perceived as marketing programs. Which brings me to my question: when a band like Deerhoof approaches a company like Indaba, when the band doesn’t want to run a contest or affiliate with a sponsor, when they just want to use our technology to collaborate with fans, is it marketing?

Ultimately it’s semantics, but the important thing for me is this: bands that take the time to connect with fans in authentic, innovative ways won’t have to do as much that would be considered proactive “marketing.” They get all the marketing mileage they need from the things they already do and the way they relate to their fans.

This certainly isn’t the first time a band has done something like this. It reminds me of the many times Trent Reznor has engaged in organic “marketing”, even if he didn’t consider his actions to be “marketing” at the time (I don’t know what he was thinking). Musicians and die-hard fans can be understandably averse to anything that is overly commercial. Softer, more authentic actions that aren’t marketing per se from bands like Deerhoof and NIN with hard-core indie followings can turn into runaway successes. The trick is to involve as many people as deeply as possible in the band’s music and life. Bands with the most intense fans do this naturally, without being told to by marketers. For indie bands, this means playing a lot of live shows, and using technology to its fullest (blogging, Indaba-ing!!!). For bigger artists the formula is pretty much the same. Even MC Hammer tweets.

Now go join in the fun and collaborate with Deerhoof!

New Contest at Indaba Music with the Derek Trucks Band!

Check out Indaba Music’s newest contest – a collaboration with The Derek Trucks Band!

Derek Trucks is widely considered the best guitarist of his generation, along with being a superbly talented songwriter, bandleader, and producer. Derek was playing paying gigs with The Allman Brothers Band and Buddy Guy at the amazingly young age of eleven and by fifteen had formed his own group, The Derek Trucks Band. The dTb is extending an invitation to musicians around the world to collaborate on the track “Get What You Deserve” from their new album Already Free. Derek and the band have made the four instrument parts available to the Indaba community.

Mariah Carey Remix Contest on Indaba Music

I am very proud to announce that this morning we launched a remix contest on Indaba Music for Mariah Carey’s new single “I’ll Be Lovin’ U Long Time.” This is obviously a big deal for the entire Indaba team – Indaba Music is a powerful way for artists to make music with each other online, and the Mariah contest showcases the platform’s ability to create that type of collaboration between major recording artists and other musicians. We couldn’t be happier about demonstrating this utility with the best-selling female artist of all-time.

In fact, when the story broke in Billboard on Saturday, it contained this priceless quotes from Mariah’s executive producer Mark Sudack:

“It’s a marketing tool as much as it is a contest,” he says. “But nowadays all you need is a laptop and a drum machine, and you have all the equipment that you need to go and make something that’s hot and sounds special. There’s so much potential talent out there that’s untapped. You could have the next Jermaine Dupri sitting in a room somewhere, and he’s got all the talent and all this genius with just no options to connect the dots.”

Exactly. It’s incredibly gratifying for us to see professionals of this caliber understanding the value that Indaba can provide to an artist like Mariah.

This contest also represents a major accomplishment for the music industry in general – these types of programs are pretty forward-thinking, and putting not just the completed song out online for free distribution, but the individual stem files is not an easy thing for most old-school players to digest. In this case, Universal Publishing, EMI Publishing, Live Nation, Island Def Jam, Mariah’s management, and of course, Mariah herself all needed to be on the same page – no small accomplishment.

These types of programs are a great way for major artists to forge a deeper connection with listeners, and they provide other artists with very exciting creative opportunities. We’re all about creating new opportunities at Indaba, especially if they add value to an industry that is struggling to derive it from as many new avenues as it can.

Subscription Models

There are 2 classic business models for web businesses, or more generally put, for media businesses. These have and continue to be advertising and subscription based. Obviously advertising models are about eyeballs – how many people can you get to look at your content so that you can monetize them through advertisers. Subscription models are closer to the models in other industries, i.e. they involve selling the customer something they want rather than giving the customer something for free and charging someone else for access to them.

Today I want to talk about subscription models. At Indaba, we currently offer a single subscription product – a “Pro membership.” It offers members enhanced functionality including increased file transfer. We originally structured our subscription product this way because it was simple – there’s one thing to buy, and it’s easy to make a decision and understand what you’re getting.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about single product subscription models. There are indeed other examples of this – Flickr’s Pro account being the one that comes to mind most frequently. However, I am struggling to come up with examples of innovative web applications that go the other way, and create multi-product subscription models. I bring this up because it seems terrifically odd and counter to long-understood business logic. To market a product effectively, you have to segment your audience, and then figure out what each segment wants. If you do this right, you can then sell each segment a product that makes sense for them.

Single product subscription services lump every potential paid customer into a single group, potentially missing the opportunity to monetize customers that need a more targeted product and associated messaging. In Flickr’s case, this might mean structuring subscriptions that cater specifically to professional photographers, or design studios, or photo buyers. This goes for Indaba as well. Certainly something for us to think about.

Anyway, I suspect this may have happened because of the overall emphasis on simplicity which pervades modern design, web development, and business thinking. Also, the entrepreneurs who start web companies are often fairly green, and when you’re inexperienced, it’s much easier to err on the side of simple. Simplicity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it isn’t the end all and be all in all situations either.

The Amazing Beatboxing Dog

A very amusing new Flash campaign for Swedish telco Tele2 features an interactive beatboxing dog.  Not sure what it has to do with the advertiser’s business, but it’s music and it’s funny so I figured I’d share.

[via GigaOm]

Digital marketing insights inspired by Avenue A Razorfish

I finally got around to reading Avenue A Razorfish’s 164 page 2008 Digital OutlookReport, and I must say that it’s a great overview of pretty much everything that is happening where digital media and marketing is concerned. It was so good that it inspired me to craft some marketing concepts for Indaba Music that I think should contribute to shaping the future of our company.

A few themes were particularly relevant and got me significantly excited about their application to Indaba:

Value for marketers needs to be measured across multiple touchpoints – not just pageviews on a homepage. In the past, you could determine how valuable a website was to marketers based on how heavily consumers interacted with it online, but now, consumers interact with websites across an array of technologies from RSS and email to widgets and content syndication. The internet now blends seamlessly with an astounding array of offline activites. No where is this more true than on Indaba, where community members download audio files which they then work with over significant periods of time offline. I found this point particularly interesting because in Indaba’s case, it means that members engage with our company in significant ways even when they are not using the website. There is value that can be delivered to both marketers and users throughout the entire story of this engagement (from pageview, to file download, to digital production, to file upload, to content syndication), and everyone, especially marketers and websites (like Indaba) need to get better at measuring, explaining, and capturing that value.

Smart companies are ceding control to their most passionate users so that they are empowered to market for them. This one is pretty obvious to those of us in the tech community, but it’s particularly relevant to Indaba. Our most passionate, vocal, and active users are both our biggest fans and biggest critics – they love what we’re doing and they don’t like it when it doesn’t work the way they want it to. Indaba as a team and a company has forged meaningful relationships with these individuals, but we can also go further and empower them to help shape the Indaba community, the message it sends to the outside world, and the tone of its activity and collaboration. It’s obvious that core Indaba members are begging for this kind of empowerment, and so we’re thinking about what the best tools and techniques will be for giving it to them.