brinking - nabeel hyatt

A new blog for music fans: Loudcrowd

One of the consistent bits of overwhelmingly positive feedback about the closed Beta over at Loudcrowd has been the music. I've personally experienced this as well. I'm listening to a whole bunch of music I wasn't a few months ago because of LC (I guess that is a good sign for a product you are working on).

With that in mind, the crew has put together a music tumblelog that'll include interviews with musicians, posting new tracks, and in general keeping with the evolving music happenings at Loudcrowd. It's written primarily by our awesome DJ Fucci, but we'll all be chiming in from time to time. If you normally read things like Pitchfork, peruse Hype Machine, read gorillavsbear, or pay attention to the indie rock press you'll notice it's a bit of a different take from the mainstream and hopefully you'll hear some new music you love.

Check it out here:

Speaking at Virtual Goods Summit, and a discount code

If yesterdays post interested you, you're probably a sure-fire target for the Virtual Goods Summit which is coming up next week. Last year I moderated a panel (video available) on Why Virtual Goods Matter, and this year I'll be chatting about Music as a virtual good. Last year it was a great day where they managed to get together just about everyone who had direct experience selling virtual goods, I've got high hopes this year as well.

I hope you can join, and drop me a line if you want to chat. You can save 10% on the cost of registration by using the code "NABEEL" at checkout.

Conference Website: http://www.vgsummit2008.com
Registration: http://vgsummit2008-nabeel.eventbrite.com

Echo Nest, it's like S3 for music tools

The Echo Nest is a damn cool company. Last week David Rusenko of Weebly wrote some nice thoughts on Loudcrowd on his blog (thanks David!). That led me to read some of his older posts, including one on Echo Nest. I don't know how I missed the announcement from the Echo Nest about their music intelligence APIs, considering how much we've been doing with music lately, but I'm making up for it here. Using thisismyjam I built this quick mix:

While that demo alone is probably enough to get you into some startup contests, there is a lot more going on here. Echo Nest is taking a platform approach, building a bevy of music-based APIs available to anyone trying to create new music tools for the web. You can watch some of the other demos they built (don't miss the "More Cowbell" demo) by watching the video from their launch at Demo a few weeks ago:

Oh, and don't miss David's thisismyjam mix, and his excellent blog..

Rock Band music sales close to early iPod music sales

If you care about music, and therefore whether that business will survive, there was some pretty amazing news from Rock Band this week that didn't get the attention it deserved. MTV mentioned that Rock Band had sold 6 million downloadable tracks in its first four months of sales. And while that roughly $10-20m in additional revenue is nothing that will alter parent company Viacom's stock, the finer numbers compare favorably to the early days of iPod.

First, let's keep in mind the state of the music business. People are pirating music like crazy, and consumers that were screaming about .99 cent DRM'd tracks six months ago are screaming about the high price of .89 cent non-DRM'd tracks today. If you want evidence at how much the music industry has changed in the last 24 months, just look at Rcrd Lbl, or the deals that Last.Fm and iMeem struck with the labels. The labels expect most of their money from those deals to come from a split of ad revenue. Which is to say they expect the incremental revenue of each track to hit zero pretty soon.

So on that backdrop, Rock Band is selling totally DRM'd tracks, locked to a single platform, at between $.99 and $2.99 each. And their attach rate considering all that is amazing. For comparison:

Five years ago on April 23rd, 2003 the iTunes Music Store launched:

• 200,000 songs in catalog (source)
• 977,000 iPods in market (source)
• 3.5m songs/Mo avg sales in first year (source, etc)

Four months (or so) ago Rock Band was released:

• 70 songs in catalog
• 1.1m Rock Band games' in market (as of January) (source)
• 1.5m/Mo avg sales in first four months (source)

The data isn't perfect: the Rock Band sales numbers are not up to date, we're not even talking Guitar Hero DLC, and the iPod had been on sale for over a year before the Music Store came online, giving it a big advantage. However, even with those caveats it is clear that people are willing to pay for more depth in their music experience, the same way they have shown a willingness to still pay for concerts. No, Rock Band isn't likely to be the next iPod, the early numbers are still off substantially from the iPod (see below). But selling active music experiences shows signs of being the growth opportunity for the industry. Which led one industry analyst to say:

"In 10 years people are going to look at idly listening to music the same way as we look at watching a TV show in black and white," said Geoff Keighley, co-chair of the Game Critics Awards that named Rock Band the best game of the industry's annual trade show in July.