Panel:
Ethan Kaplan, Warner Bros., VP of Technology
Lucas Gonze, XSPF, Founder and Creator
Tantek Celik, Microformats.org, Technorati
Marc Canter, Broadband Mechanics, Founder & Pioneer of Computer Based MultiMedia
Ethan: Warner Bros. is an open source. We're looking for standards that have momentum and drive our technology development. Everything has been architected so that when we open the API I can reconcile the data against what we have license for. As a philosophy, we treat each band as special--as its own business rather than treating Warner's as a business. We created the destination site for REM that aggregated from multiple sources: Facebook, MySpace..we had 7000 pieces of data. We want to allow the artists and bands to express themselves freely online.
Tantek: Yahoo's SearchMonkey aggregating search engines--that helps each review lead back to the site.
Marc: How long is there for Rhapsody or iMeem to exist before the labels update themselves and move out of brick and mortar business. May be 10-15 years before they get there. GraceNote is filling the space now but sooner or later, as this evolves and changes, these companies will go out of business.
Marc: How do you solve the cross-over issue when I'm a user and have everythig on MySpace and now a new vendor comes along and now do I have to move everything there? I want to buy one song once. "I want to have URLs that stay consistent and I can leave it for my grandchildren! Once it goes up there it ain't going away!"
Ethan: I don't think record companies have taken a good look at the data they have. We're sitting on 50 years of data which never really comes to pass that you realize that. We have 150 artists and 400,000 tracks on the label that want attention and that people want to give attention to. There are probably over 400 SKUs for Talking Heads...for the last Metallica record there are 400 SKUs for that record alone. Record companies are going to have to start thinking about how they evolve from being major record labels to major music entertainment companies. Our aim is to get the data, funnel it into our own internal API that we manage internally. 150 artists, 95 sites, each one of the artists wants to have a website and start a community, etc. We have a huge catalog which is not metatag rich. We need to add semantical that will add to make it rich. We have an anachronistic back end data that's very linear. Reconcile 48 megabyte excel file with terabytes on terabytes of collected data of user behavior online and that's not an eay process. Luckily data is data and computers are very capable. We are looking at data first right now.
The goal of microfomats is to make publishing easy and allow a conversation. By publishing little bit of audios, they enter the flow that you can take together, mashup, and run various algorithm on it.
Lucas: The technology industry is very dismissive of the music industry problems and the music industry is very dismissive of technology problems.
Marc: "I predict that within the next 18 months, the record labels will be albe to offer the same services that MySpace is offering to its users. Warner's will give you the ability to embed music into your blog post directly!"
Tantek: Never underestimate what a 14 year-old can do. MySpace has already shown that 14 year-olds will put plenty of markups in line with user benefit.
Ethan: The trouble is when the idea exceeds the experience of the user you're trying to communicate the idea to...
Marc: All of Madison avenue is watching MadMen. There's plenty of money out there. They don't want to put their ads on TV. Budweiser pissed way $30mil on their ads. Why not pay bloggers to tag concerts...you can take that beer money and spread it around better instead. There are a lot of opporutnities...there are people who'll do anything to promote their brand. It's up to all of us to connect the dots.
Marc: I take the point of view of the customer. Whatever I come up with that can help the customer must be a good thing!
"We're an enterprise based IT company so it's hard to get it centralized. " is not something I said.
Posted by: Lucas | October 22, 2008 at 08:29 AM
Thanks for the correction, Lucas. Removed.
Posted by: Ravit Lichtenberg | October 22, 2008 at 08:56 AM