Panel:
Steve Jang, imeem, CMO & Head of Business Development
Josh Brooks, MySpace music,VP of Marketing and Content Development
Rachel Masters, Ning, VP of Strategic Relationships
Anthony Batt, Buzznet, Founder and President
Moderated by Theda Sandiford, "Internet Marketing Guru"
Rachel: Ning has 534,000 networks. Since they're not tagged this way, hard to tell how many of these are music oriented. One example for extremely effective marketing is the band Hollywood Undead were discovered on MySpace. They developed a social network on Ning. Got the conversation going, taught people how to use the network, provided steady stream of new information, created a contest around masks, gave a winner backstage passes, used the submissions to create "skins" for their MySpace page, etc.
Josh: Still to early to tell how MySpace music pages pay off for users. MySpace has to be an amazing platform for the distribution of mass content. "Rabbit Hole experience through innovation." We have to continue to build. You realize what your fans like, what the world of the internet is doing, and you take obvious lessons and build better products. Innovation is happens month after month.
Question: MySpace and music labels--how have sales been?
Josh: Too early to tell. MP3 is a solution over DRM. Iterative process- doesn't happen over night. Sort of doing backward metrics to be able to compare to previous numbers. Streaming is the big thing--we need to see where that's going and what's the revenue model behind it. "49 million US users on MySpace have created more than one song on their profile." Ticketing, merchandising, better playlist acquisition--we're all building. We know what our users are going to want.
Theda: And one click playlist purchase!
Steve: There are a lot of hurdles to overcome. Most of the really good cover downloads are owned and operated by largest and most closed large companies. "You can't just go in and grab the content for self serve." We're one of the top partners for iTunes and Amazon. We're creating an interest flow. E-commerce is tough. Look at Zappos--they have 500 people at customer support alone. We're working to maximize the data transfer across and optimize the e-commerce aspect.
Josh: Record labels recognize it's more than about the round plastic and are investing in companies that can help them move forward.
Anthony: "We wanted people to create a conversation around music, not just to listen to music." We wanted it to be a lean forward rather than a lean back experience. What grew out of that is that we saw there's a deep authenticity as part of this experience. We let people operate as important voices on the web, their URLs aren't Buzznet URLs. Back in the day we had great DJs who played on radio shows...we see this as a great time to program music experience with products like iMeme--they can create their own radio shows. They're putting all their media in one place and creating a rich conversation. If it's cheesy we'll leave it alone, if it's authentic we'll acquire it or work with it.
Rachel: "The job of the future is a community manager." Every artist should have a community manager on their team. They're like the editor in chief, your DJ: they decide what pictures or blogs or playlist to feature and where.
Anthony: Users online don't want to see banners but offline events are great for marketing.
Ad buyers have a hard time because they're getting thousands of calls a day. They're onboarding millions of calls. The Ad buyer would like to do something more sophisticated but they simply don't have the bandwidth to do it so they go with banner ads. It's the pace of the business. Advertisers need to think differently about social media and social networks. They need to think about advertising more responsibly. Advertisers still look at reach and ROI on number of clickthroughs. We try to tell them that what they want is different. "I think it's going to take 5 years to change this business models."
Steve: "Advertisers are trying to take the traditional online advertising model and push it on social networks and on music-focused networks." On the sales side you need to have people who understand the product and sell the product or the message will sound the same. The reason they want clickthorughs is that it's the only data they can hang their hat on. Doesn't work in social networks because clickthroughs happen less on social networks--you don't leave the site as much as on search sites which are designed for sending you someplace else (and the foundation for measuring clickthroughs).
Anthony: I've said this before: "The people at the edge are going to produce the most music." There's a lot of demand on the consumer side for media. Advertisers will have to catch up to that. There's a lot of media being created at the edge--bloggers or people at home creating media. There are hundreds of high school students breaking music news every minute. Absolutepunk.net gets a high ComScore. This is the best time to be here.
Rachel: Musicians and music publishers should take an example from where blogging is today.
Question: If you were at Facebook, how would you join the party?
Steve: I'd put it on the front page. Music is a lifestyle. Most people really like music. Integrate music wherever they have music flow experience rather than bend it into separate segments. Streaming, videos, sideshows--these are the things people like and that make it a personal media connection and that's what we're trying to do--making it personal.
Anthony: Facebook has 500 music aps so they must have a strategy. I don't that they need to or should do anything differently. I think that all these great entrepreneurs built great aps. I'd try to work with the music developers that are there but I'm more about what the user wants and less about what the company wants.
Josh: Facebook has done a great job at what they do. Facebook made it simple to use. MySpace is more about the chaos that takes place in the industry and that works for us- not sure that would work for Facebook.
Rachel: "Streaming will increase the engagement on Facebook." Can't leave anything on the table. Amazing opportunity for Facebook to start surfacing all of the content that's on their networks. I think we'll see Facebook getting into this area over the coming years it's just a question of priorities.
Question: What's the impact of the economy?
Anthony: "I'm just going to turn the music up and work really hard."
Josh: This is the last panel you want to get financial advice from. We're going to continue our work: musicians are going to play, music will be produced. We're not seeing the impact yet. But I bet you that people are going to spend more time online and listen to music online.
Anthony: "If people change their behavior they're not going to disconnect their internet."
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