The Changing Demographics of Social Media

Flowtown created this nice infographic yesterday illustrating how the average age for social media users is increasing. For example, the average Facebook user is now 38 years old, and 64% of all Twitter users are now over the age of 35. Does this shift change social media strategies for artists, labels and online music services? Probably, but it would be useful to know what sociological factors are driving the increase, how are these age groups using social media, which countries and cities represent the greatest increases, etc.

Music Industry Marketing and Millennials

Are you marketing your music, service or music technology to millennials? If yes, than you may want to study this infographic below, created by Flowtown last Friday.

IOUmusic: crowdfunding for artists and fans

Yesterday, IOUmusic launched the public beta of their crowdfunding app for the music industry, providing artists with a creative alternative to financing their careers by allowing fans to make donations to artists they want to support. Looks like they're open to how they evolve their product, so connect with them and provide your feedback.


 

The Rise of Michael Jackson's Popularity

Its been one year since Michael Jackson's untimely and tragic death, and his music and estate (i.e. licensing, publishing, merchandise, etc.) has generated close to $1 Billion in the last year alone, but does that make him more popular and influential than the Beatles or Elvis as this article seems to suggest.

It's impossible to say at this point-in-time, as popularity increases and decreases longitudinally according to sociocultural conditions and market demands, among other factors and thus, popularity and influence must be measured overtime, and one year's worth of data is not sufficient for drawing conclusions, nor making comparisons.

Regardless, it is fitting to pay homage to the King of Pop today, as there's no doubt that he is one of the most influential artists and cultural icons, and his seminal music will endure for generations to come.

TuneRights: a stock exchange for songs

Looking to sell shares of your songs, allowing you to receive capital upfront to finance your career, while allowing your fans to earn a portion of your song's revenue, then take a look at TuneRights. Essentially, this web app (still in beta) aims to provide a stock exchange for music, where songs work like stocks, and your fans can purchase ownership in them. While you may not want to sell much ownership in the songs you think are hits, TuneRights may be a great way to help motivate your fans further, as they will share and earn income from your success.

Interview with My Audio Bio

Curious about My Audio Bio? Below is a brief email interview with the founder, Dan Morris.

What is My Audio Bio?
My Audio Bio is an autobiographical catalogue of your musical history. It gives you a way to connect your life to music, sharing your stories with your friends on Facebook, as well as making new friends by connecting over the stories you post. You can also turn your stories into a soundtrack by assembling playlists for them.

Why would someone use My Audio Bio instead of blogging about or sharing their experiences within their social networks?
My Audio bio is a central place for people to share their personal music stories, a catalog of your life in music powered by Last.FM and Facebook. Also, users on social networks are mostly sharing what they are listening to currently, which is great, but MAB allows users to share how music effected their lives.

It seems My Audio Bio is still in the early stages, what features is My Audio Bio building for future releases?
At present, My Audio Bio users can publish their Audio Bio's to Facebook, and tag friends in their stories. We have entertained the idea of having a Facebook app that allows Artists to publish their "MAB" albums to facebook, but we do not have this in the works today. We are also releasing our iPhone application, playlists publishing with iTunes, and expansion into live concerts on the site. We are also exploring some partnership opportunities that will further the users experience and provide a new direction for our business model.

What is My Audio Bio's business model?
We will offer a light version of our iPhone application, which will be free, but we are also building a paid version that will allow for a much richer experience. Ultimately, the ability to purchase songs along side each story will be in place throughout the site.

How Does Social Influence Effect Music Discovery?

Yesterday Bob Lefsetz wrote about the challenges of getting people to pay attention to your music. While he's correct that music recommendation and discovery is difficult, partly due to the increased amount of music content (i.e. signal-to-noise), democratically filtering out which songs and artists are the rising ones based on quantifiable and qualifiable information will require technology. For example, The Hype Machine does this well by mining the blogosphere and Twitter. The question is, will a human element remain necessary to the process? If so, what does that look like? Who are the social gatekeepers? Does their influence on an artist's popularity help or hinder music discovery? How are the social gatekeepers determined?

Seemingly, it's too early to see how social influence will impact music discovery, but I'd like to hear what artists, managers, labels and the like think by contributing to this post with their thoughts.

Psychology Professor to Examine Relationship Between Music and Emotions Using Moodagent

In what will surely be a fascinating study, Dr. David Echevarria, professor of psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi is planning to use Moodagent to examine the impact of music on emotions. “I’m hoping to use Moodagent as a teaching tool to stimulate conversation, learning and critical thinking in the area of emotions and psychology,” said Echevarria. “As a psychologist, I am fascinated that a mobile application that can discern subtle and elusive emotional qualities in music. There are some individuals with various disorders who find this an extremely challenging – if not impossible – task, and here we have a app that can do it! Moodagent is essentially a form of artificial social intelligence.”

According to Moodagent's press release, "it has long been known that music can either positively or negatively affect a person’s mood, state of happiness or stress level. Many people often turn to their favorite music to help themselves feel better, happier and more relaxed when they are feeling down or stressed, which can in turn affect mood-enhancing neurochemicals. For example, listening to music that normally makes one happy and promotes feelings of relaxation will trigger the brain to release serotonin, a naturally occurring anti-depressant neurotransmitter that boosts feelings of happiness and stimulates the mind and body to enjoy a more relaxed state."

Hopefully Moodagent will forward his findings as I'm sure it will be worth reading. As mentioned briefly on IMT last year, Moodagent lets listeners create playlists based on their mood, or create playlists to change their mood. The Moodagent engine, in part looks at one’s music library to understand the emotional characteristics of his or her music, and chooses the best music for the listener based on their emotions.

Three Videos Worth Watching

If you haven't seen these videos, you may want to find 20 minutes to watch them - you'll be glad you did.

CNN interview with Tim Westergren of Pandora:

Derek Sivers' Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy:


Nate Harrison's history of the the Amen Break:

Visualize the Artists you Listen to Most on Last.fm

Normalisr has made several enhancements over the last year-and-a-half, including a new site design, graphical widgets and thumbnail views of artist charts - nice work! If you haven't tried Normalisr before, it's a quick and fun app that ranks the artists you listen to on Last.fm, from the most number of tracks and time per artist, to the least.

For me, I'm not surprised by the artists Normalisr visualized for my profile, but I wouldn't rank those artists in that order. Meaning, I'd rank my favorite artists differently, but that's the beauty of apps like Normalisr, it's dynamic, like our music behavior, so it captures what we are listening to at moments in time, periods which are influenced by both internal and external variables (e.g. sociological, cultural, psychological, etc), reasons why music charts like Billboard are antiquated. Capturing and reflecting these types of influences relative to one's music listening activity has fascinated me for years, as it explores causation, an area that hopefully Band Metrics will eventually tap into.

Music and Society: Segmenting your Fan Community

Yesterday I gave this presentation at the C/O POP Music Festival and Conference in Cologne, Germany. Essentially, I explored the relationship between music and society, and how artists can better understand their own fan community through segmentation, which can lead to fan growth and increased revenue for them. Since I had several people ask for a copy so they could see the Facebook example and the resources again, here it is. Btw, Band Metrics will begin providing fan segmentation next week.

Social Influences on our Music Tastes

One of the reasons Band Metrics is being developed is to provide an application that will help display insight into some of the social interactions that influence success for bands, musicians and songs. To help further understand these social drivers, I've been going back to some of the sociologists and philosophers I've studied in the past. The one I've been focusing on lately is the German philosophical sociologist and musicologist, Theodor W. Adorno.

If I understand Adorno correctly, he seems to suggest that our individual music tastes within our social groups only contain minor differences, as the different artists we are listening to are producing similar music. Interesting position, and if that's correct, then what are the social drivers that cause one band to break out above all of the other bands we like? What impact do the influencers (i.e. tastemakers) of a group have on the band's rise? Do these tastemakers change overtime, within particular demographics and/or geographic locations?

It seems that part of Adorno's premise is that our musical tastes are not developed in a vacuum. Rather, they are developed out of contexts, and intricately and subtly constructed from within the social groups we are apart of (e.g. friends, family, colleagues, etc.). But, they are also seemingly deconstructed overtime, for example, as our social groups change, like when one transitions from high school to college.

Do you think Adorno's position is valid? What and/or who do you think are the influencers of the music you listen to? Do you tend to agree with them on their music recommendations?