Producer Robert Margouleff On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

I'm happy to have producer Robert Margouleff on my latest Inner Circle Podcast.

Bob has been super influential in that he was largely responsible for the synthesizer coming to the forefront of popular music, which led to co-producing four of Stevie Wonder's most beloved albums (including my personal favorites Inner Visions and Talking Book).

Bob was also an early proponent of surround sound music, a torch he carries to this day with Headphone Surround.

In the intro we'll take a look at why Pandora buying the online ticketing agency Ticketfly may be a big deal for artists, and some quick and easy soundproofing tips for home studios.

Remember that you can find the podcast at BobbyOInnerCircle.com, or either on iTunes or Stitcher.

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Pandora And The CD

I rarely cross-post from my Music 3.0 blog, but I think this topic is important enough to make an exception.

Regardless of the trends towards online digital music, CDs are still important. Sure, you may sell a few, but it's the hidden advantages of the format that everyone overlooks.

Take Pandora for example. I came across the following section on their submission FAQ.

To submit music to Pandora, you'll need these items:

1) a CD of your music

2) a unique UPC code for that CD*

3) this CD to be available through Amazon as a physical CD (and not just as MP3s)**

4) the legal rights to your music

5) a standard free Pandora account, based on a valid email address, that will be associated with this submission

6) MP3 files for two of the songs from your CD

Once you have all of these items ready to go, you can submit your music to Pandora for consideration here: http://submitmusic.pandora.com/.

Take notice that the only way to get on their playlist is to have a physical CD for sale.

It's the same thing if you want your music reviewed. It doesn't matter if it's on a blog or traditional media, you're not legit until you have a physical product that you can send to the reviewer. I saw this exact situation for myself a couple of years ago when I was producing the first SNEW album. I was all for releasing it digitally but the band insisted on a CD and they were right. Even though the music was released online months before the CD was available, they couldn't get a single reviewer interested until the physical CD was released. As soon as that shiny plastic disc was available, they were perceived as a viable entity and received more than 100 reviews (almost all of them great, by the way). For their recently released CD, "We Do What We Want," there was no question that it would be available on as many formats as possible, and once again we've been rewarded with at least as many reviews, band interviews, and a ton of airplay. I'm convinced that it wouldn't have had nearly the success without the physical product.

It used to be that pressing CDs was a pain since you had to not only pay for them up front, but keep them in inventory and distribute them as well, but even this isn't much of a problem these days. Services like Kunaki not only allow you to press CDs on demand, but they'll drop ship them as well. They look like a million bucks (as long as your artwork looks that way) so that old worry at the "CD-R look" doesn't apply.

So while there's no doubt that the music world is more digital than ever, the CD is still a useful distribution tool. Ignore it at your own peril.

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Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating the music business.

Internet Radio Plays More Artists Than Broadcast

We knew this already, but a new study by streamSerf, a company that reports on music played on terrestrial, Internet and satellite radio stations, indicates that last month broadcast radio stations in the US (including public radio stations) played 25,399 unique artists while Internet radio stations played 829,971 unique artists during the same time period. That's a difference of about 3600% and does not even include stations that stream personalized channels, such as Pandora.

But that's not even the real story, according to Paul Mockenhaupt, founder of streamSerf. For him, "It’s the new, fresh, undiscovered, local, home grown music that’s filling the internet airwaves!” that's really making the difference. Internet radio finally gives a chance to be heard to a host of artists that previously had none.

Also interesting is the list of artists that get the most plays on broadcast stations versus Internet radio stations on the chart on the left. This list is skewed a bit because it comes during an unusual period of  Michael Jackson and Beatles activity, but some of the top ten artists are the same on each list while others are very different. It will be interesting to have a look at this chart in coming months when there are fewer superstar releases.

Music Subscription Still Coming On Strong

As posted a few times here previously, online music subscription is coming on strong, although sometimes the indications are subtle.

It's been reported that the online radio station Pandora now has over 35 million listeners and getting 65,000 new subscribers a day. Pandora isn't exactly a radio station in that you select the tunes you want to listen too and the service then supplies you with music based on your selections that it thinks you'll like, but it's close enough to a subscription model that 35 million listeners will have no trouble switching over whenever either Spotify becomes available in the US (it's being held up by one of the major labels), or iTunes flips the switch on it's service.

Then comes the news that over 500,000 iPhone users have downloaded subscription service Rhapsody's phone app, and you begin to believe that music subscription really is right around the corner.

With subscription, everyone wins, almost. For a flat fee (some say that $9.99 per month is the sweet spot), a subscriber gets all the music he wants to hear, any time and any place. That's a whole lot better than having to buy something new that just hits the charts for $1.29 per song, or having 20 gig worth of music cluttering up your drive.

The record labels win because they're getting the majority of ten bucks a month per subscriber every month. No marketing, no inventory, but lots of profits just like the gravy days before MP3s.

But of course, the artist is left out in the cold, since most label deals don't cover subscription at the moment, or the deals are so weak that it means virtually nothing to them in terms of income. And an artist can't even rely on publishing from subscription, since there's not a mechanism currently in place to digitally sort through all the streams in an efficient manner, not to mention the fact that we're only talking a fraction of a cent per stream anyway. This, of course, will be rectified eventually, but not without a long hard battle and a lot of money in the label's coffers first.

But rest assured, if you've not already indulged, music subscription will be coming to a computer or phone near you - sooner or later.

Digital Music Is About To Change

You can feel it in the air (or on the screen might be a better phrase). Digital Music is about to change, hopefully for the better. For years the major labels and every industry pundit has been predicting that music delivery by subscription will be the future instead of music downloading, and it looks like they might be right.

Why collect Gigs of downloads when you can listen to virtually any song you'd like to at any time, anywhere? That's the premise of subscription music, which until recently, didn't seem to have much steam behind it. Sure Rhapsody and Napster had a tad less than 2 million subscribers, but you really couldn't call that critical mass.

But in the last year, the free service Pandora has picked up steam and gave even the most casual listeners a taste of what subscription could be like. Now the buzz is that Europe's highly touted Spotify service is about to enter the States as they solve their licensing problems with the major labels, which the pundits see as a game changer.

But the 800 pound gorilla is lurking in the jungle. Rumor is that Apple will trot out a subscription service based around iTunes soon, which will open up the floodgates and change the industry forever. As industry consultant Ted Cohen said in an interview for my upcoming book, Music 3.0, "If iTunes announced subscription tomorrow, we’d be over the hump."

Yet questions remain. It seems like consumers now understand that they only get 10 songs per month for $10 from a download service as compared to 10 million songs on a subscription service. The bigger issues will become if and how the artists get paid fairly from that $10 and if publishers can build a mechanism to take advantage of the digital accounting so the songwriters can get paid as well (it's now done manually and costs too much to administrate).

The next 12 months should be very interesting indeed in the digital music world.