The Coalitions’s new research project aims to, “assess how musicians’ revenue streams are changing in this new music landscape.”

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1.  Grooveshark is a successful music streaming site reaching with over 30 million registrants, so why get in the artist development space?

Because our users are always looking for great new artists, and we’d love to give artists the opportunity to reach our users.  In the past, our users have been especially prone to engaging with artist promotions that we’ve done.  We’ve seen phenomenal success with some of the artist promotions we’ve run in the past from bands ranging to Interpol to Lady Antebellum.  While those artists have a great deal of name recognition and a pre-existing fanbase, we were somewhat surprised to see that promotions involving emerging or baby bands were receiving comparable levels of engagement.  In spite of the high engagement levels, these promotions were still done on a relatively small scale.  We started thinking about what positive impact we could affect on a smaller band’s career if we really went for broke with a promotion and then forged partnerships with other companies to market them outside of Grooveshark.  Hence the decision to get into artist development.

2.  What are a couple examples of artists you’ve signed and what went into your decision making process?

Right now, the first band we’re working with in this capacity is Quiet Company.  We found them the best way that we know how: through our users.  We took a look at a lot of the consumption data and identified about 100 bands that weren’t on a label and yet were experiencing an extremely high growth rate in plays.   We then ran a few subtle promotions to effectively focus group each band to a broader demographic of users to determine which band would resonate the most.  Quiet Company ended up being that band by a very large margin.  They’ve got a record coming out on October 4th and while we’re still going to push them to a large amount of our userbase, we’re going to ensure that they’ll be placed in front of the users that have shown a predisposition to liking their kind of music.

We’re not foolhardy enough to think that we’ll be able to subjectively pick out the next great band, so we leave it up to testing, data, and our users–who are ultimately smarter than us, anyway.

3.  Do you see artist development as being more profitable than your on demand music service?  Why or why not?

The two aren’t actually separate–we take the popularity of the “on demand music service” as the main force bringing value to artist development. Our core business is the on-demand music service, but as that grows so do the opportunities and value points for artists of all sizes.  If we can have even a modicum of success in moving the needle for a band online by ourselves, imagine what’s possible with the marketing muscle of a major record label or large independent? Grooveshark is excited to be a part of the way bands are discovered and become popular in the 21st century–and our vast user data is a great complement to all the hard work bands and managers put into that.  Our existing label partners have found success in pushing their bands to that audience, and I think that we will too.   In the future, we want to bring on as many partners and bands as we can, be it on the label/management side, other music services, etc and utilize that ecosystem to benefit the careers of a myriad of different artists.

If you’re familiar already, poke your head around Grooveshark and give a listen to Quiet Company.

This is just a guess, but I’d bet money that Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz probably feel like their heads are going to explode. Anyone on the Google+ team who really cares about G+ is probably getting very little sleep, and are annoying their friends and family with their one-track G+ minds. There’s been such an amazing amount of feedback, the Google+ team can’t help but be overwhelmed—and what we see is just on the site and in the press. Imagine what’s coming into that “send feedback” inbox that’s at the bottom of every G+ page?

At MySpace I tried to digest that “inbox” and “community” by myself, and that worked pretty well for a few years. It was a little easier back then, but today’s G+ users are an entirely different breed. There are a ton of early adopters, technologists on G+, and they’ve all been through the social networking ringer before. G+ users are offering powerpoint slideshows, illustrated screen mockups and long-winded essays on what needs to happen. There is genuine, high-quality thinking going on in the “free advice” that G+ is receiving from the global community. How can the G+ team cut through the noise and decide what’s important? (Especially when there’s some really high quality noise being directed Google’s way.)

Here’s a few things I’d do right now, if I were Google.

1) Start seriously courting the journalists, tastemakers, and celebrities that are using and/or pontificating about G+. This doesn’t mean Google should ignore “regular” user feedback, or even that Google should do what the triumvirate says they should do. It just means they should have a real, personal relationship with those people. During MySpace’s run-up, journalists continually got their facts wrong about MySpace. They wrote story after story about how Facebook was bigger than MySpace when in truth Facebook wasn’t even 1/10th the size of MySpace.

Why? Because the journalists’ Ivy League educated children were using Facebook, and journalists have deadlines and other things to think about. If you get to know people, they think of a real human being when they write those stories, and they care a little more. I don’t want to say people are “sheep,” but if the general Internet population believes G+ is happening and here to stay, then they’ll commit the time to try it out. Popular opinion is the biggest “filter” for most people—they don’t have to try something if they’ve already been told it’s not cool. Popular opinion is the ultimate “social search” if you will. This doesn’t just apply to user counts (G+ hits 20 million!), of course. Popular opinion will shape every aspect of people’s G+ perception.

2) Exhaustively think through the privacy issues and tie up any loose/ends that G+ has on this front. I’ve seen multiple people share their phone number with me without knowing it. They may not be wanting to share other things as well, though those things have been less obviously private. I’d make sure that people understand how their posts can be shared/reshared, and how their other Google accounts (profile, Gmail, docs) and content (Youtube, Picasa) are connected to G+. I don’t believe Privacy is a real issue to most people, but most people think it is a real issue to them. As thus, it plays a big role in the psychological justification for defecting from competitors. “Safety” hysteria destroyed MySpace in the press. It got MySpace banned from schools, Apple stores, and by well-meaning parents who had been terrorized by what they were reading. Privacy advocates have tried to destroy Facebook and Google in the past. You need the best PR person in the world on your team, Google, but even more so, you need to make sure the software doesn’t give the privacy hounds something to be rightfully angry about.

3) Move Google’s top analysts (probably focused on monetization right now) onto the Google+ project to form a skunk works team. Mine the data about G+ usage like it’s Gold, because it truly is the future of Google’s long-term revenue and profit growth. (And I actually don’t think there’ll ever be advertising on Google+, theme for another article.) Facebook was really good at understanding their onboarding process, knowing what key activities led to later usage (adding x number of friends, putting up a picture and getting a response, etc.).  Google needs to closely track users who are not adopting the service, those that are, and try to understand what type of user is the one that is ahead of the curve—identify the user who is illustrating the future “common” use case through their pioneering activity. G+ needs to understand all three types of users and develop a plan for each of them.

4) Hire the best product executors & visionaries in the world, something that clearly has not been Google’s forte in the past. (In fact, it seems that some good ones have left, because they felt they weren’t valued at Google).  I’m not referring to run of the mill product managers and UI developers or “social media experts,” but rather that rare breed of people who have demonstrable experience leading users down the path to internet nirvana. Google has the engineering talent and ability to scale the G+ service (more valuable than people understand, right now, I think). But does Google have the product people? Google’s technical infrastructure will allow them to do things that other social sites could not do—in fact, they’re already doing that. They need product visionaries who can understand that. Though I love G+, some parts of G+ are really a mess right now, and two that are incredibly important at this stage are in need of much work: onboarding & photos.

5) There must be one ring to rule them all. One leader making decisions. Maybe that person is already in place at Google; I don’t know the internal hierarchies within the company. But the leader himself, and every employee must understand who this is. Making a website is similar to making a movie—hundreds of people work on it, one person makes the final decision, and they make them every minute of the day. I use the LOTR analogy because there may be 12 extremely important product people (point #4). But someone needs to make the decisions. And to further that analogy, if the ring goes bad, the Hobbits need to throw the ring in Mt. Doom and find a new leader. OK maybe this analogy doesn’t work, but you get the point. All the opinions and analysis will paralyze anyone who is not up to the task. That person has got to bring it all together and make decisions based on his gut and understanding of the overall company’s mission. No that leader won’t always get it right, but the clarity achieved and time saved is crucial. The Internet moves at lightning speed. If you mess up, a resolute leader can iterate and fix. This is worthy of its own dissertation (read Randall Stross on this point about Steve Jobs/Apple vs. Google right here).

You learn a lot when you mess up. I messed up a lot, so these are just a few of the things I learned. By the way, these lessons aren’t just for Google.  They also can be applied to any startup, so good luck everyone. I’m hoping to see you all make your mark on this world.

Grammy Award-winning musician Imogen Heap used her time on the TED Global stage on Tuesday in Edinburgh, Scotland to not just perform, but to demonstrate an entirely new way of creating music.

Editor’s note:  First mind-controlled instruments…now this????

Using a pair of gloves equipped with wireless mics, an accelerometer, a magnetometer, a gyroscope and a variety of other sensors, Heap created a song on the fly — complete with sounds from a multitude of instruments and effects — using only her body movements and hand gestures.

The performance was more than two and a half years in the making, the culmination of a project that Heap first became interested in after seeing the beginnings of such technology at MIT. In an interview with Mashable afterwards, Heap told me she wanted to use body movement to create music so she could “communicate the hidden 50% of the performance.”

Those movements include, for example, the ability to record a loop by opening her hand, filtering sound by bringing her hands together and panning by pointing in the desired direction. Volume can also be manipulated with some fitting gestures — a “shh” movement initiates quiet mode and a horn sign prompts “rock out mode.” The sensors that Heap’s gloves are equipped with send the movement data back to a computer that then blends it all together to create a relatively robust piece of music in real-time.

Seeing is most certainly believing in the case of Heap’s gloves, and the artist now plans to start using the gloves with some regularity during performances. Ultimately, however, she wants to be able to add features that would enable her to create an entire 60-90 minute performance “walking on stage with nothing but the gloves,” she said.

Enhancements that would enable that to become a reality include the ability to play a wider variety of instruments using hand gestures, let multiple musicians performance simultaneously (like a drummer) and the ability to let the audience participate in song creation. Thinking even further out, Heap told me she wants to be able to, “invite fans on stage … and let them be a part of the performance from their own bedroom,” by leveraging connected gloves and hologram technology.

Of course, that would require the gloves to become more than a one-of-a-kind item, but Heap says she’s been thinking about how to do that in the wake of the response so far. Commercializing them isn’t her primary goal, but she says she’d be very excited to see how it can empower other artists.

“I love the idea that you can buy a pair of these gloves … be connected to an iPhone app … and capture sound on the street and start making beats while you’re waiting at the bus stop … and upload that to a database,” she said.

Image courtesy of James Ducan Davidson / TED

Social media-savvy musicians consistently encourage fans to get interactive by remixing tracks or creating videos to accompany their favorite songs. But virtual band Gorillaz upped the ante last year with The Fall, an album recorded entirely on the iPad. The latest apps now grant iPad owners even greater creative freedom by allowing them to compose and mix their own music from scratch.

Korg iElectribe Gorillaz Edition: Gorillaz used 20 distinct apps to record The Fall, but they’re aiming to bring a more streamlined approach to iPad music-making with this beat-box app. Made exclusively for the iPad in collaboration with Korg, the virtual synthesizer allows users to create and manipulate sounds for layering into electronic tracks. The app is not Korg’s first iPad venture: its original iElectribe app made waves thanks to its impressive analog beat-box capabilities. However, this special version is distinctively band-branded and it uses Gorillaz-created sounds for sampling. Initially billed as a limited-edition offering, the app is nonetheless still available in the iTunes store.

Shapemix: Aspiring DJs will revel in this remix app, which lets users reinvent nearly 100 pre-existing tracks by adding effects, shuffling musical phrases, layering in newly recorded sounds, and sharing their best versions via Facebook and Twitter. Shapemix is not the first user-friendly mixing program—both David Bowie and Bob Dylan previously released apps (for iPhone and Facebook, respectively) that allowed fans to remix songs from their classic albums. However, Shapemix separates itself from the herd with an element of e-commerce, as mixers can listen to one another’s original tracks and purchase their favorites via iTunes at two bucks per song.

Polychord: What Shapemix does for sound sampling, Polychord does for songwriting. The app features virtual drums, bass, chords, and accompaniment, but is driven by chord progressions above all. When a user chooses a chord of their liking, drums and bass automatically follow, allowing for effortless composition of a melody. The program has been touted as ideal for beginners (though pros are making use of it, too), and a recent update allows the program to be used as a MIDI controller, giving musicians the ability to play it wirelessly during performances. Demos abound on the web—so if you still can’t figure this one out, you’ll have nothing to blame it on but the bossa nova.

SoundCtrl is giving away 20 invite codes, thanks to our friends at Chevy.  To enter please email soundctrlblog[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

The code will be good for a free account that allows the user unlimited streaming with ads (as opposed to the regular US account that limits users to 10 hours of streaming).  Once the codes are gone, you go to Chevy’s Facebook page to try get one.

Cheers and enjoy.

The revolution has begun!

Post by Jesse Kirshbaum