TechCrunch Disrupt – Day 1

Posted on | May 25, 2010 | No Comments

So far so good. 1400 attendees. 30,000 online viewers throughout the day. A reported 25 f-bombs dropped (most notably Carol Bartz to Mike Arrington). More importantly, the internet worked perfectly.

I got into the conference a few minutes late into Charlie Rose’s one-on-one with John Doerr. Charlie has interviewed 15,000 people including musicians Danger Mouse, Robbie Robertson, as well as a tete-a-tete with Lars Ulrich and Chuck D, so the name should at the VERY least ring a bell.

The second chat that Charlie had was with Yuri Milner who was one of the initial investors of Facebook. He said that “Facebook is unifying civilization.” That didn’t really hit me until he quoted this statistic: there are 10,000 pieces of information exchanged every second on Facebook. So if there’s that much information and content on Facebook, what could the music industry do to monopolize on Facebook’s potential especially if, as Yuri believes, “friends are the most important driving factor in purchasing.”Are we doing everything we can? What can we do differently? On the flip side, what can Facebook do to help us?

Surprisingly, the Funny or Die folks who were on their panel were both funny and insightful especially Andrew Steele who was one of the head writers at Saturday Night Live. Andrew said that, “the internet is a great laboratory for finding out what works,” and I 110% agree especially for the music industry. This is why you have bands paying people $1 to download or doing video covers to get their original music noticed. We haven’t found a model that works yet, but I’m glad music, similar to comedy, is trying things out.

After lunch (which was better than most other conferences I’ve been to), there was a fireside chat between Arrington and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, which began with Arrington greeting with, “So how the fuck you doing?” This inevitably set the tone for the rest of the talk. Arrington comedicly attacked alleged statement’s of Bartz on the topic of Google that she claimed to be out of context. Google does rely heavily (>90%) on ads for their revenue, but with Yahoo they’ve had to diversity a little more, which promoted her to say, “why does coke invest in water?” This is applicable to us because the music industry can’t rely on “cola” anymore…we have been searching for our water, juice, or energy drinks for quite some time, but nothing that really sticks for most bands.

Next up were the co-presidents of MySpace. I was curious to hear their perspective on their current clout in the music tech space and future changes they will make to increase their market share…will they ever get where they were even just 2 years ago? These guys seemed to think so because, as they say, they have hovered around 120M unique users per month, but Arrington claims their numbers have dropped from 126M to 111M, which is an approximate 12% decrease in popularity. If that is true, will that percent be constant? Will what they say say they plan to do revitalize people’s interest in the social networking site? My guess is no.

After the MySpace panel, I was getting pretty tired from the day, but a friend told me I should stick around to see the demo for UJAM. My initial thoughts: UJAM is the dumbest name ever. But I stuck around and was ecstatic with their product and supporters (including Pharrell and Hans Zimmer). Essentially, this music tech service allows anyone to create music without knowing how to sing or play an instrument. All you have to know is how to hum and let your imagination do the rest because you can turn the rhythm of your voice into guitar, drums, piano…the potential is endless. This is a good thing and a bad thing for the music industry, but I plan on interviewing them tomorrow, so I’ll get into that later.

So much for day 1. Stay tuned for Day 2 and 3 as well as my interview with the UJAM folks.