It was a full day at the San Francisco Music Tech Summit. Brian and Shoshana Zisk pulled together a welcoming and laid back event that quietly brought together major labels, music startups, distributors, artists, and music marketers. The full list of speakers is here.
Major takeaways:
- There's a lot of technology being developed in the back-end of data management.
- Lots of widgets and solutions that help one or another part of the value chain--some just for distributors, some just for labels, others just for the manipulation, aggregation, and organization of tracks.
- Audio quality and archiving are issues that need to be resolved.
- Traditional marketing no longer works on social networks--and definitely not for music.
- Everyone feels the challenge of working across the value chain, across devices, across platforms. Cross-platform solutions are going to be a focus in the coming months and years.
- Customer experience--user experience--was only brought up a few times by strong advocates like Marc Canter, a few people on the Social Media panel, and, surprise, Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind.
I strongly believe that the experience of music--listening, creating, sharing--cannot exist in a vacuum simply as a technology track void of human understanding. When it comes to such core sensory experience as music, both the technology and the music industries should invest in understanding human behavior, motivation, cognition, and perception. As in any other space where a gap is all of a sudden found, and companies rush to address it, we'll be seeing the mushrooming effect of music platform solutions from each part of the value chain that will let users interact with, and share, music. Those that will stick after the big peak will be those who have carefully studied and understood their users' needs.
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