Label:Life

Recently in an email discussion regarding the musical career of an up and coming song writer, it was made known that he (the song writer) had uploaded his tunes to hitsongscience to have his tracks appraised for pop success…

He writes:

My scores were at an average of 6.2 with a few 7s and 7.15s. The site says that a score higher than 7.3 has a high hit potential.

Which is great, but then after a few other replies in the discussion an email from another contributor to the list, Nicholas McRoberts, bounded in with a very elegant reply…

In full:

This is an interesting and long standing debate about what makes music pleasing! And it’s not just with internet that these questions have arisen. In 1722, Rameau wrote “Traité de l’harmonie”, discussing in detail how to make a hit song for the 18th century and this was by no means the first discussion of the subject – there are traces of similar philosophical debates going back at least to Greek antiquity.

However, despite what they teach us at the conservatorium – “Pop music is easy to write. It’s all formular based” – the reality is quite the opposite and the music that becomes legendary tends to change the way we hear all music by shifting subtlely AWAY from actual trends. For example:

Nowegian Wood – The Beatles
Stairway to Heaven – Led Zep
Nothing else matters – Metallica
Come away with me – Norah Jones
Yellow – Coldplay
The Bends (the whole album) – Radiohead
Smile – Lily Allen
Rehab – Amy Winehouse
Relax, take it easy – Mika
Whenever, wherever – Shakira

etc. etc.

And while there is an element of structure that is often similar (or the same) this only lets us guess what will happen when and not whether or not it will be exciting, agreeable etc.

I think of this as a recipe. If you set out to make a complicated french dish (like Fillet de lotte enrobé de noix et contisé à l’andouille de Guéméné) and you don’t heed a recipe, you may succeed or fail. If you use a recipe, you may get closer but you may also burn, overcook, undercook, oversalt, overspice, mash or generally mess up the dish. If you don’t have fresh produce to begin with it’ll never taste any good!

Regarding the hit song science site – this has been the holy grail of music researchers since IT allowed us to dabble. Algorithms that allow us to understand and predict why and how we like music. It sounds sexy but the state of the art is actually pretty rudimentary. No website offers to “read” your novel and tell you whether it will be a best seller or not because it’s not possible – simply because computers can’t “understand” what they’re reading. The same is true of music.

I (naughtily) uploaded a real hit song to HSS to see how it scored.

In 2005, the single “Vertigo” by U2 won in all three categories in which it was nominated: Best Rock Song, Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and Best Short Form Music Video. The single, which topped the charts in several countries, including the UK. It reached #31 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and it topped the digital downloads chart in both the US and the UK, becoming U2’s best-selling single ever in the US with 2x Platinum status.

Vertigo scored only 7.12 on HSS (pdf attached). Take heart Betinho! You’re right up there!

This is so great on so many levels…

Personally I think the service is great, but as we know there is far more to a hit song than just musical ability…

Just found this post over at the excellent Wiretap site. Basically a new government initiative in the states will stop a schools funding for EVERY student if one of the is found illegally downloading copyrighted material…

The real eye opener: noncompliant schools would lose all their federal funding, for all their students. No more Pell Grants. No more federal financial aid. No more student loans. This is not just draconian punishment for students who break the law, this punishes all students at that institution even if they did nothing!

Schools would be required to endorse a “legal alternative”. Will we start to see the big media companies courting schools like they have done with radio stations?

EMI is cutting funding to “trade bodies”, which essentially means the IFPI, RIAA and the like. With the RIAA alone getting over 130 million dollars in funding from the major labels, maybe EMI is realising that instead of spending their hard fought cash on attacking everyone and alienating their customers, they might be better off spending their money somewhere else.

EMI has been pretty forward thinking of late being one of the first labels to offer en-mass DRM free music to the likes of Amazon and other retailers. With EMI being recently acquired by Terra Firma it will be interesting to see what other strategic changes they make. This move could be the next lynch pin for the music industry since the Radiohead story…

See the full article here

Microsoft says that it has signed an exclusive deal to acquire Musiwave, who’s customer s includeO2, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Telus, Telefonica, amongst a myriad of others.

Musiwave provides music services to operators including full track downloads, ringtones, truetones, ringback tones, etc. the pull for Microsoft is obvious here, giving them a direct relationship with many labels and operators directly and therefore indirectly millions of consumers through branded portals.

the acquisition would bring together Musiwave’s relationships with music labels, device makers and operators with Microsoft products and services including Windows Mobile, Zune, MSN and Windows Live.

For every clever trick that Google pulls such as the newly announced Android platform, Microsoft just seems to steam in with its brute force attack. Although this one, I think is very shrewd on their part which is something of a rarity for MS lately.

More at Computerworld

This has to be the surprise release of the day. Industry Canada, part of the Canadian Federal government has released a paper – The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada – after studying the relationship of P2P file sharing and music sales. The results are to some of us; not that surprising, but clarification and decent data at last is significant.

I think a quote from the summary of the paper speaks far more than my rambling commentary ever could.

The primary objective of this paper is to determine the effects of P2P file-sharing on purchases of CDs and electronically-delivered music tracks, using representative
survey data from the Canadian population.

In the aggregate, we are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada. The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole. These inferences are based on the results obtained from estimation of the negative binomial models (Table 4.1 and Appendix 4).

However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing. We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year (based on estimates obtained from the negative binomial model in Table 4.3). Furthermore, we find indirect evidence of the ‘market creation’ effect of P2P file-sharing in the positive coefficient on the variable ‘Not available elsewhere’ (Table 4.3).

The full paper can be found here – The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada

It seems that Nokia’s Mosh is causing problems for it’s music store offering

Warner, which is the third largest music company behind Sony and Universal, is preventing Nokia from selling its music in the Nokia music store as a protest against the illegal trading of its releases in Mosh; Nokias content uploading and sharing platform.

This appears to me as a bit of a paradox for Warner. On the one hand they are creating negative PR for themselves by bad mouthing Nokia and to a certain extent the fans themselves (the traders) whilst on the other hand they need to appear to be protecting their IP to their shareholders and artists, sounds familiar.

Nokia meanwhile are laughing either way. The profit they make on selling music I suspect is minimal and like Apple the whole content thing to them is a way to sell more handsets. The only possible outcome here for Nokia is a win. Either way, many more people are going to hear about Mosh (have you?) and now you as a consumer are more likely to get Warner tracks on Mosh than through the Nokia store. Smashing, thanks Warner for letting us know.

It’s been a week, the music industry has survived (apparently) and Radiohead have distributed over 1.2 million albums from their website. It’s not clear if these are all paying or not but either way you can bet that their next tour (coming 2008) will be a sell out.

According to a poll of 3,000 people the average payment was $8, so four quid – £4.8 million in a week. Seems a bit of a lesson to me…

To be honest I’m not sure how accurate we can call these figures but even if it were for free, that’s a lot of new fans in there. If I remember rightly there was an admin fee of 45p, which makes over £500,000 in administrative fees, presumably for bandwidth and storage (bet they wish they’d used Amazon S3 now).

The Big Champagne guys (they track downloads through p2p networks and bittorrent) are on about how illicit downloads of the album are dwarfing the real sales, but frankly, so what? More awareness, more fans, more merchandise, more gigs, more money – less need for a label or any traditional media coverage.

Prince is king… We’ve seen that Prince has given away his music with the daily papers in the UK after finally escaping from his deal. We’ve seen Radiohead do it, Oasis want to do it, NiN are there too, these amongst a growing number of artists are taking their destinies into their own hands, being proactive not reactive, we’ve yet to see how well this will serve them in the long term.

Madonna on the other hand has played her hand and signed a deal with Live Nation, not a record company but an events company. With a three album deal for £60 million and the backing of Live Nations gigging ability and fans unwillingness to pay for music, could this could possibly the shrewdest move yet and the real beginning of a new era for the music industry…?

Snocap was and still is a great idea. Putting control into the artists and labels hands, allowing them to sell their tunes directly form their website/blog/myspace pages. The only problem these days is that nobody wants to pay for music and as a result Snocap is laying off 60% of its staff and is getting ready to sell on.

the company’s music stores just weren’t catching on fast enough and its time to sell the company

The music industry currently requires that anybody getting involved from a distribution or technology point of view must be extremely AGILE, or they really don’t stand a chance. Things are changing too quickly to be hiring massive teams and making two year plans, it’s like the shift from sheet music to recorded music, adapt or die.

Having waited four years for their heroes to finish another record, Radiohead fans were understandably excited last week to learn that the band’s seventh album, In Rainbows, will finally be released on Wednesday. But what really rocked the fanbase – and heightened the air of gloom enveloping the global record industry – was the news that In Rainbows could be preordered and downloaded perfectly legally for as little as 1p at Radio-head.com.

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Maybe the music industry will listen to this rally… We all know that there’s no money in selling music directly anymore, it’s just that the only people who lose out are the labels… They will resist, they will react, they will lose… The new labels, the artists, the pro-active ones; they move with the times, they see what is happening around them. They know that they need to survive and feed their families but they also see that their music is as entertaining as ever and they understand the new media world.

They build fan bases, fan loyalty and interact with their fans in a way that the fans want to make an exchange with them. Radiohead are one of the pioneers taking this forward and although we’ve seen Prince have a go lately too, Radiohead seem to be on the edge. They’re opening up new fans – have they been watching Nintendo who’ve very famously of late managed to open up the games market to masses of new fans…