Last weekend I was at Music Hack Day in London, a gathering of software developers who hack on music related applications and try to finish a project in not more than 24 hours. It was a very inspiring event and next time, I hope to be there with some developers of the Motion Music Manager team.

I did a couple of interviews with some interesting people and there is quite a lot of content coming up. Today we start with Paul Lamere from The Echo Nest. It is his belief that developers will shape the future of the music industry and I quite like that idea myself: artists and developers should work together to determine the faith of music.

If you try to make a living of your passion, such as becoming a professional artist, you are probably familiar with this situation. Sometimes you need to do a job you don’t exactly like, just to pay the bills.

That’s what I’m doing the last couple of weeks. In fact, it’s not really dirty work. I’m not washing the dishes in a restaurant or cleaning toilets. I’m translating a book about Chinese history and culture. It’s rather interesting, but tiresome… and it’s not my passion.

But I can’t complain. I also had some nice gigs with Amatorski the last weeks. I just wanted to let you know why I am not really active on the Motion Music Manager project. I would like to push it forward, blog more often and I would like to present you the new features coming up soon. But well, you know why everything goes slower than one would like.

Maybe there is one lesson to learn from this post: we shouldn’t complain too much about things not going as we would like it. It could be worse. And it will become better one day.

This is the second part of an interview with Brenden Mulligan,  the founder of ArtistData. The interview is part of a series about the founders of internet & music startups. The basic idea is that people who have an idea about building a project around music and internet are driven by a strong passion about their project, much the same as musicians are passionate about their music.

Artists should get a picture about the difficulties of running a startup and should be able to recognize their own situation in the story of the startup founder, because in a way they are running their own startup: their musical career.
ArtistData, a service that helps more than 25,000 artists to update their social network profiles in a more efficient way. Last June, ArtistData was acquired by Sonicbids.

You can find the first part of the interview here.

What would you consider as the biggest mistake you made in the history of your startup?

ArtistData was my first startup, so I was supposed to make mistakes. I look back on every mistake –and there were many – and am glad I made them because I (most likely) won’t make them again.

Although I can’t pick one specific mistake as the biggest, I can say that one lesson I learned was not to overreact to competition or outside events and let it blur your focus. There were many times that I felt that I needed to react immediately to something happening with other companies, the market, etc… There were certain moments where that was necessary, but the majority of the time I spent worrying about competition I should have spent focused on making my project the best it could be.

What do you consider as your major achievement?

Completing the cycle. Building a company from scratch that developed a product that added value to people’s lives, which they cared about and enjoyed using. Growing the product and user-base over time in a natural and meaningful way. And then selling the company to an industry leader.

How did your original plan change during the actual evolution of your startup? Which were the major issues?

ArtistData was originally going to be a dashboard where managers would keep track of all the data that was relevant to their artists. Once we started building it out, we realized it’d be a lot more useful to open it up to all artists to use themselves. That was probably the single biggest decision we ever made.

We were always challenged by a lack of resources. Where artists (used to) try to get funding from record labels, startups try to get funding from venture capitalists. When getting funding in either instance, you gain a ton of experience from the funding party, but you also lose a lot of control. We ultimately decided when presented with the funding opportunity, because of the size of the market and historical exit potential for music startups, it’d be better to continue to bootstrap rather than take on outside investment. But that meant our development was slower than we’d of liked and we didn’t have money for marketing. But in the end that decision paid off.

How do you think artists can benefit from your experiences of developing and marketing a startup? Are there similarities between marketing an artist and marketing a startup?

What I found is that if the product is great, it markets itself. If you find yourself struggling with marketing, reexamine the product.
ArtistData added a lot of value, didn’t cost anything, and was easy to use. Artists found that compelling and told each other about it. Our user-base grew 100% because of word of mouth marketing. Then, when we layered some social networking components on top (auto posts to Twitter, ArtistData branded landing pages), we saw a boost. But it was only a boost because people were using it. We never did any real advertising or marketing.

I think artists have a similar dynamic. Most great, talented, and appealing bands find an audience. That audience could be with a small loyal following or people around the world. It could mean a record label is involved or the artist handles everything themselves. But if the band is truly talented, and if they know who their audience is, their music will find ears.

At the same time, bands without the right talent or appeal will face a similar fate to a startup with a bad product: their friends and family will be fans, but it’ll be harder to convince everyone else it’s worth their time.

Recently you got acquired. How did you feel about that? Does it change the way you look towards your business? Do you think that a comparison can be made with an artist signing a record deal with a major label?

I think the more analogous situation would be more what I described above regarding investors. In that case, most of these questions are more relevant. Suddenly, there are a lot more people to answer to and more interests to align. At the same time, there are many more resources at your disposal and larger opportunities seem to come more often. In that case, I think it’s very similar to getting a record deal.
Getting acquired is a bit different and I’m not sure there’s an analogous situation for bands in the music industry. Sonicbids, the company that acquired ArtistData, saw value in what we had built and knew that coupled with its existing industry-leading product, it could bring a lot more value to its users. This would be more like a record label acquiring a smaller record label. The smaller record label has an amazing catalog and artist roster, but the larger label can bring years of experience to the table, not to mention stronger distribution and promotion. Because the smaller label joins the larger label, all the artists on the label have access to more resources and more experience. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

What is your biggest dream for the future?

I want to keep working on inspiring products that create value for users and improve their lives.

Recently I started writing for the influential music and technology blog Hypebot. I will repost some of the articles that I wrote there on this blog.

This interview is supposed to be the first episode of a series about the founders of internet & music startups. The premise is that people who have an idea about building a project around music and internet are driven by a strong passion about their project, much the same as musicians are passionate about their music.

Artists should get a picture about the difficulties of running a startup and should be able to recognize their own situation in the story of the startup founder, because in a way they are running their own startup: their musical career.

We kick of this series with Brenden Mulligan, the founder of ArtistData, a service that helps more than 25,000 artists to update their social network profiles in a more efficient way. Last June, ArtistData was acquired by Sonicbids.

When you started on your startup, what was your background and your relation with the music industry and the internet world?

Before ArtistData, I worked at Aware Records and Asquared Management. Every day was spent supporting artists who were just starting out in their careers. Before that, I spent time working for a booking agency, festival promoter, and club promoter. I got to experience the industry through a lot of different lenses and see some common pain points for artists.

What was the tipping point where you said to yourself: this is the problem I should solve! At which moment did your really get excited about your idea and did you decide that you should move this thing further?

As digital music platforms continued to crop up, I found myself spending more time every day monotonously updating websites for our artists. It seemed to be a completely waste of time for a human, giving it was a problem technology could solve. I figured if data management could be more streamlined, managers, artists and everyone else could focus more on what’s important: the music. Keeping information up to date in crucial marketing channels is really important, but not if it comes at the cost of creating better music.

When did you start talking with other people about your idea? Was is difficult to convince other people? When did you have the feeling: I am working with a team on a project that we are all really passionate about?

The idea bounced around my head for about a year. In early 2006, I decided that it was time for me to move on from Aware and it seemed like a great time to dig a little deeper into the ArtistData concept. I took on some consulting work with an independent online music store and also managed a very small band while refining the ArtistData concept. I think it was around mid-2006 when I started really understanding what ArtistData was going to be, and that’s when I started looking for someone with a technology background to help me get it off the ground.

The idea itself was pretty straightforward. A tool that helps artists update social network sites through a central entry point. Everyone who had worked in the industry knew it was a problem and if we could build an affordable solution, most people would use it. We started building and by mid-2007 we started to see a product we were all really excited about. It’s hard to describe the feeling the first time I added a show and it posted to MySpace, PureVolume, and Virb automatically. It seems trivial now, but this was before Twitter and public APIs were popular. It was like magic.

Would you compare the team dynamics of a startup with the situation where some people come together to form a band and really get excited about sharing a passion?

I think it’s really similar, but all depends on the startup. When a band comes together, it’s a bunch of musicians with slightly different skill sets working on a common creative project. Eventually, they get non-musicians involved to help with the business aspects of things. In a startup (specifically technology), the analogous situation would be when a team of software engineers come together to create software. They all might have different skill sets (one is better with the front end code, one is better with databases, etc…) but together they are able to write a complete application, much like a band is able to write a song. The major difference is that in most startups there is the business person there from the start, where bands rarely have a manager working with them from day 1. But regardless, both startups and bands are a group of like-minded people coming together to work on a singular project that they believe can touch the lives of millions. And that’s an amazing dynamic.

Did you reach moments where you had a difficult time and the motivation was low? Did you think about giving up? What made you to put the negative feelings aside and pushed you to go forward?

Definitely. A startup is a never-ending series of joy and fear (and every emotion in between). One day you think your product is the best thing in the world, the next day you worry about a competitor, the next day you get a term sheet from a venture capitalist, the next day your star employee quits, the next day you successfully launch amazing features, the next day your servers go down. Eventually you close the company. Or you sell it.

It’s an emotional roller coaster, much like being in a band. Artists are constantly getting yesses and nos from record labels, agents, fans, etc…. One night you’re playing for 5,000 people because a larger act asked you to open for them, the next night you’re playing for 20 because you’re the headliner in a random city. One night, out of nowhere you sell out of CDs and the next night no one wants to even take a free demo.

But the thing that gets artists up every morning to keep going is the same thing that gets entrepreneurs up: they believe 1000% in what they’re doing. The minute that artists or entrepreneurs stop believing in their project, their work becomes less genuine, the project suffers, and eventfully, they quit.

But as long as the have the belief and passion in their work, they keep getting up, no matter how many times they were knocked down.

Lefsetz on Spotify and the economy of free:

Spotify is so good, it closes you instantly. But the rights holders refuse to offer this dope. Under the guise of maintaining the value of music, of not making music free, but don’t you get it? MUSIC IS ALREADY FREE!

Ariel Hyatt cites the Top 7 Reasons Why Artists Resist Social Media. What is your stance?

1. I don’t want to be pushy and over-hypey.

2. Social Media won’t put any money in my pocket.

3. Social Media and Marketing takes too much time.

4. “Social” Media isn’t “real” media.

5. Social media is just for young people.

6. Status Updates on Facebook and Twitter Tweets are stupid.

7. I’m not a social person.

And think about this: how many clicks does it take to buy or to listen to your music?

This might seem a bit off-topic on a blog about the music industry and about how musicians can benefit from the opportunities of the internet to forward their musical career. However, being well-organized and being able to keep track of all your tasks, projects and ideas, is not a minor problem for musicians, in my opinion. It is at least how I feel about it in my life as a musician and an entrepreneur.

So I decided to read Getting Things Done by David Allen, one of the most acclaimed books about time management. The book has a very practical approach and contains a lot of useful tips and insights. I would really recommend to read it. In this post I will touch some topics that where the most revealing for me. In a later post I will talk about how I try to apply Allen’s principles by using the Remember The Milk app.

Point n° 1: It is important to have a physical representation of all your to-dos, tasks and projects. It is the best way to ‘clear your head’. If you don’t write anything down, you always keep worrying about things that you should do and your brain doesn’t have time to really focus on getting things done. If everything is written down, a lot of stress disappears.

Point n° 2: Allen stresses the importance of the question ‘What is the next action?’. Meetings, brainstorms, etc., they are not useful, unless you ask the question: ‘What is the next action?’ In your daily life, what you actually do is managing your list of ‘next actions’.

Crucial in Allen’s theory is the work flow diagram. I think the diagram is quite self-explanatory.

One of the most important aspects is the two minutes rule: if you can do something in two minutes, do it now. If it takes more than 2 minutes, delegate it or defer it to another moment.

I hope this short introduction will entice you to read the book and will help you to get more productive.

In my opinion, there is changing something in the economy because of the internet. Before the internet, it was the best strategy to protect your goods from your competitors if you wanted to be successful and get rich. Nowadays, you get rich on the internet by sharing, by collaborating with other people. A good example is the Facebook ecosystem. Facebook gives access to the data of its user base to other software developers, who build nice applications on top of the Facebook framework. Eventually we end up with a better situation for everyone: Facebook users can use great applications, Facebook has an overall better product to offer to the users and the 3rd party developers can build a business around the data gathered on Facebook.

The bottom line is: in the end you reach more by collaborating than by competing. How can we translate this to the music business and the practice of promoting artists? It is quite easy: bands can cross-promote. Artist A says that he likes band B a lot, the fans pick it up and they discover a new artist. Band B can do the same thing in return.

Headliner.fm is a power tool to cross-promote via social media. In the scheme below (made by Board of Innovation) you can see how the system works. In fact, artists are trading fan base reach with each other. Depending on the size of your fan base (they count your Facebook fans, Twitter followers and MySpace friends), you get a bunch of ‘band bucks’. With these bucks you can ‘buy’ promotion campaigns on the channels of other bands. If the other band approves your campaign, a message about your band is automatically posted on the Twitter or Facebook account of this band.

I think this is really a clever recommendation model to extend the fan reach of bands. The major issue, however, is the following: as an artist I must be very careful about my authenticity and credibility. I only want to recommend the bands that I like and that are relevant for my fan base. Headliner.fm thought about this and they stress that they don’t send posts unless you approve them. However, that’s not enough for me. I signed up for an account with my band Amatorski and I get about 5 promotion requests per day, but I didn’t approve any. I think there are some weak points that Headliner.fm should improve to make this work:

• The messages of the bands that send me a promotion request contain too much ‘promo talk’. I want to use my Twitter and Facebook account as an information channel, not as a sales channel. I guess the bands should get some education about this. It is like writing copy for Google or Facebook ads: it is important to find the most compelling phrasing and you must search for the best ‘conversion rates’ by testing different messages. Headliner.fm could offer some automatic intelligence tools for this.
• Closely related to this: I want to edit these posts which are sent to my accounts. It is my communication channel and I want to add my personal touch. The requesting band can make a suggestion, but in the end I decide which message is posted. My fans want to see it is something that I wrote. They hate and will ignore posts that look automated.
• In the overview of promotion requests I want a simple play button to hear what type of music it is. I only want to recommend the artists that I like. Now, if I see this request from the other band, it’s not easy to decide fast about the quality and relevance of the music.
• It appears that I receive quite a lot of requests from hip hop artists. That’s not really a good match with my own band Amatorski and the chance that I would recommend these artists is rather small. Nevertheless, users of Headliner.fm can select artists by genre to pick the targets for their promotion requests. Maybe artists need to be educated about this too. Conversion will be better if you target bands in your own niche.This is related to the first point that I made. Maybe it’s also a good idea to add some recommendation intelligence from Last.fm or Pandora into the mix?

Conclusion: interesting model, but it needs some improvements. Below you find the video explaining the concept of Headliner.fm. Feel free to try it out.

headliner.fm Sizzle Reel from headliner.fm on Vimeo.

Here comes your weekly homework: my selection of things to read.

There is a long interview on Hypebot with Aaron Ray, the online strategist for, among others, Linkin’ Park. He has a very intelligent view on the future of the music business and society. It is really worth to read the whole interview, but I would like to cite this small part:

Almost all marketing and economic plans from say, before 2007, are worthless. The plan was to service radio so that brick and mortar retail would respond and people would buy a CD and chart on a single publication. Repeat. Once MySpace was bought by Fox and YouTube by Google- all bets were off. Word of mouth is what was empowered.

Read part 1 and part 2 for the whole interview.

There is a good story about how Amanda Palmer used Bandcamp to earn $ 15,000 in a couple of minutes. Everybody’s dream about direct-to-fan sales.

And we end with two nice tutorials about the Google family:

10 Free Google Tools to Manage Your Music Career
HOW TO: Use Annotations to Promote Your Brand on YouTube

I had a busy week with Amatorski this week with not much time for blogging. I will just refer to 2 mirror posts.

5 Reason Not To Sign A Record Deal

and

5 Reasons That You Still Might Want To Sign To A Record Label

One of the aims of this blog is to keep you informed about new things in music business and internet, without overloading you with tons of information. In fact, that’s the main problem of the internet: too much information and no good filters. Each week I try to filter out the most thought-provoking items. It gives you the opportunity to spend only 15 minutes a week on keeping abreast of new things.

This week I would suggest to spend 7 minutes on this talk by Dresden Dolls’ and Twitter guru Amanda Palmer. She relates her career as a street performer to where the music industry is heading in the digital age, a virtual patronage society, where every artist proudly stands on their box and ins’t afraid to put out their hat and ask their fans for money for their music.

Resource: Hypebot