Tag Archive for: online

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Ridin’ with Hypebot

My buddy Bruce Houghton at Hypebot, caught me last week for a quick interview before Rethink Music.  Here is an except from our discussion:

HYPEBOT: Your new focus is on consulting and investing. Are there any sectors, particularly within music and music tech, that particularly interest you or where you see the most room for growth?

DAVE KUSEK: Online education is one of them. This is an area that is already transforming how people learn and gain job skills and it is only going to grow as time goes on. There are big opportunities here that will effect tens of millions of people around the world. Online training is going to be huge. Job requirements are shifting and people need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances that can benefit them. The traditional model of higher education is already under pressure and there are many people and companies exploring alternative models that are very interesting.

The other area I am bullish on is live music and live events. The live concert experience cannot be digitized, yet can benefit enormously from technology. There really has not been much innovation in live music or in music merchandising beyond ticketing. I think there is a lot more that can be done with mobile technology and am actively working in this area. My investment in Tastemate is one way of digging into this potential in a meaningful way. We will be bringing our service to a venue near you, very soon.

I also think that there is potential to expand the reach of live performance using remote technologies. I am interested in ways to cut the costs out of touring to make it more profitable and to reach broader audiences. It is amazing to me that there has not been more activity in this area either, so I am looking for companies and people to work with that are thinking differently about what live music is all about and how to make it even more lucrative.

HYPEBOT: What are some of the things that Digital Cowboys has done in the past or is looking to do now?

DAVE KUSEK: We are focused on business development, marketing and product development, particularly in online and mobile services. We also do strategy consulting for businesses wanting to expand or enter new markets or make acquisitions. I say we, because while I am the managing partner, I also leverage a network of people around the world and with different specialties that I bring together to form a team to address the issues. For example, with a lot of the product work that we have done I brought together a team of visual designers and user experience people to execute on the product vision and do the testing. With business development projects I sometimes work with friends that have particular contacts or relationships that are beneficial to my clients. Sometimes I put together a couple different investors or strategic partners to provide capital or distribution or some other need. The main thing is to get the work done and show results, while trying to have some fun and work on interesting projects that are pushing the envelope.

HYPEBOT: There’s some talk of another tech bubble. Do you see think we’re approaching one in music and media technology?

DAVE KUSEK: I do think that some of the deals we have seen recently are off the charts, like Instagram – but who knows? That has all the earmarks of “bubble” written all over it. But Facebook is also about to go public and at their level, what’s another billion dollars?

But really I don’t think overall that we are at the point of frivolousness and excess that we witnessed in the earlier dot-com bubble, at least not yet. I believe that people are just beginning to figure out better ways to communicate and interact and learn via technology. That is having massive implications on the future of society around the world. Take a look at the stock market trend over the past 100 years and you will see that things tend to move up and people get smarter and more prosperous. I am an optimist.

There are a lot of music startups getting funded these days and certainly they are not all going to make it. I think we will see some consolidation in the DIY space as there are probably more companies addressing that market than the market really needs. The same is true for music streaming and distribution and music discovery. I think the real breakthrough companies will be formed by trying to do something completely different, rather than mimicking the past with technology. We’ll see.

HYPEBOT: Any plans to write a follow-up to the “Future Of Music” book?

DAVE KUSEK: I plan to spend a lot more time posting things to my blog and on digitalcowboys.com. This is a much better way to continue to update original thinking and way more efficient than writing another book. The music industry has gone digital and online outlets like Hypebot really do work as conduits in this business. That is a real bright spot in the transformation of the music industry. So, look for more at futureofmusicbook.com.

You can get the entire interview here.

More coverage from Hypebot here and from Billboard here.

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Peter Jenner on the Future of Music

Photo credit: http://bit.ly/18lnuFf

Photo credit: http://bit.ly/18lnuFf

Former Pink Floyd and T Rex manager Peter Jenner, now emeritus president of the International Music Managers’ Forum, talks online music, copyright and the future of the music industry.  It is very satisfying to see the ideas expressed in our Future of Music book becoming mainstream concepts in the industry.

>As physical sales decrease, how should the music industry be monetising its content?

Record companies believe that music is about selling bits of stuff to people in a retail environment. They always looked on the internet as a potentially huge retail environment and it’s actually a service environment. The record companies should be working out what services they can provide.

They should also be talking to ISPs instead of fighting them. The key thing is people are going to want music as part of what they get on their digital connections. The ISPs are going to have to invest more and more to develop better services, and in that context they will have to start charging for content, whether they charge for content directly with a meter or whether they bundle it or use advertising or sponsorship.

Another way to go would be to look at statutory licensing for different types of usage. It would be incredibly bureaucratic but it would be one way. So let people access whatever music they like and pay a set rate. The same with commercial businesses.

>Do record labels still have a role to play in the music industry?

Yes absolutely, particularly for investment and promotion and marketing. And they could become very good at licensing, at helping artists to develop their website. But they have to get away from this idea of control and instead become partners of the artists. Many of the record and film companies are very enamoured with the idea of control because it’s how their model has always worked, with in-house lawyers and copyright advisors. There is huge inertia in the way the industry licenses and administers content. We have to fight this.

>How have the sources of revenue in the music industry changed?

Until the CD came along I think artists overall got a better deal and more control and a better bite of the money. After they invented the CD the record companies increasingly fought back, decreasing artists’ revenue share and increasing their control. That’s just got worse with the advent of the internet because there is less money available. You used to be able to sell 5,000 albums, now that is incredibly hard so the industry has to look at digital options, but a lot of web services don’t pay properly. Google will pay you a share of the revenue you generate for them, but if you don’t make them money you don’t get money.

>Has social media changed the way bands are marketed and content is discovered?

Yes, but it has huge potential to do more. At the moment, because it isn’t licensable, it isn’t doing the job that it ought to be doing. But what it can do is alter the value chain. With less money available in the music business we have to instead look at what we do have. And what we have is lots of data on music fans. Marketing has always traditionally been more expensive than recording but we can cut these costs by using social sites and viral links. And maybe we can cut out advertising costs because acts can just directly email their fans.

>Can music-streaming services support the music industry?

They are good, but they don’t have all the music. I manage Billy Bragg and there are a hundred versions of his tracks online. I can get a recorded version but a lot of the times on these services there are no live versions. And globally there are billions of tracks so the problem remains of how people find a particular piece of music or if they like something how they find similar bands. People aren’t just looking to buy the music, they are looking to buy a service which is personal and recommends music and enables discovery and which saves them time. I’m not sure anyone is really offering this yet.

>Is there a future for physical music?

Yes, but its role in the industry will become less. Probably physical music, like CDs, will become very expensive and luxurious and they will be like hardback coffee table books and people will only buy maybe one or two a year. The music industry’s job is to make as much money as it can from a track or album, and that includes physical sales alongside digital sales, access services and anything else they can come up with.

>What do you think the music industry will look like in 10 years?

Probably very similar. But what we might look on as broadcasting income will hugely increase. Most revenues will come from users paying to access the content. You won’t notice that you are paying for recorded music so much.

I think the artists ought to be much more powerful, whether they will get it together is another matter. There will be record labels, but whether they will be labels that own content or just be agents I don’t know. They might be more like the Performing Rights Society and less like Universal.

Read the whole interview here from Sara Vizard at Strategy Eye

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Next Generation Leadership in Music

A new study, released by the US Department of Education, found that many types of online education for a college degree are better at raising student achievement than face-to-face teaching is.

That’s quite a seal of approval.

The big advantage in digital learning is the “time on task,” or flexibility for a student to absorb the content of a subject. Once students are given “control of their interactions,” they can set their own pace. They often study longer or visualize a problem differently. Professors are also forced to design better instructional techniques by the very nature of the technology.

The most effective learning occurs when a school combines e-learning with classroom teaching. Yet for many students, such as stay-at-home parents or those with day jobs or those with low income, online learning is all they can afford in time or money.

The Education Department is making plans to create free, online courses for the nation’s 1,200 community colleges – which teach nearly half of undergrads – to make it easier for students to learn basic skills for jobs. The courses would be offered as part of a “national skills college” managed by the department.

The rapid rise of e-learning may finally help burst the bubble in rising tuition costs, which now average more than $25,000 a year for a degree from a private bricks-and-mortar institution.

Someday the best college teachers in the country won’t need to be confined to one institution but will find their lectures and course materials spread to millions of students at low cost via the Internet. That would be a huge, historic leap in productivity for the education industry.

The US needs more competitive workers with advanced degrees, a goal set by President Obama. In the past decade, the number of university students worldwide is up by nearly half to 153 million. Any country that makes learning more accessible and less expensive through cutting-edge cybertechnology – say, by putting textbooks on devices such as the Kindle – will have a leg up in the global knowledge economy.


Read more from CS Monitor.

Check out Berklee’s Online Music School

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