From Read Write Web

Despite all of the great innovation happening in online music, there are 3 frustrating things for consumers that need to be addressed by Apple, Google, Facebook and others.

Read full article here.

Lil Wayne released his new album, Tha Carter IV, on Monday at midnight. It’s been more than three years since his last official, full-length album, the triple-platinum-selling, Grammy-winning Tha Carter III. During the drought Lil Wayne had various legal issues and served eight months in prison. But his fan base has continued to grow, thanks to his digital strategy. Part of that is providing his fans with a steady stream of leaked songs and guest verses on other musicians’ songs, but the other part comes from his Facebook fan manager — 21-year-old Mazy Kazerooni.

In some ways, Kazerooni is your typical tech startup prodigy. He left high school at age 17 to work for a live video streaming platform called Ustream.

“Ustream gave me a very interesting perspective,” Kazerooni says. “When you see how many viewers somebody can get on a live video stream, you can really understand how connected they are to their fans, how many they have, how much they love them. It’s a lot harder to get 10,000 people to watch you at the same time then it is to get 10,000 views on a YouTube video.”

Kazerooni initially set out to lure big name rappers like Lil Wayne into using the site to reach their fans. But then it turned into a side hustle—working as Lil Wayne’s digital consultant, helping to grow the rapper’s presence on social media platforms beyond Ustream.

“He had a million fans sitting on his page, and no one had access to it,” explains Kazerooni. “No one even really knew what Facebook was, on his team. I had to argue with them for like a month to give me the information I needed to get the access.”

Kazerooni multiplied the number of fans on the page to 30 million in a little over a year.

“Now, there’s a lot of attention being paid to what’s happening online,” he says.

Joanna Dorfman is the site editor at Ustream, the startup that gave Kazerooni his first job. Kazerooni built buzz for the site by pursuing all kinds of celebrities, from bloggers to musicians, as some of its first users. He pumped up their live broadcasts on Ustream’s Twitter feed. He’d slip into their chat rooms and offer tech support when they hit a glitch.

“I heard ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ being thrown around a lot, as a phrase, but I didn’t really see an illustration of what that meant until I met Mazy. He has it,” says Dorfman.

You might not expect rappers to swoon over someone like Kazerooni, a baby-faced Persian American from Orange County who didn’t grow up listening to rap. But in videos posted to their Ustream channels, popular rappers like Wiz Khalifa and Lil Bow Wow sing Kazerooni’s praises.

“I appreciate you, Mazy. You’re like the Ustream Jesus, man, you really is. You just come out of nowhere and aaahhh…you’re just going to help every celebrity on that Ustream,” Bow Wow says.

Arguably, the celebrity Kazerooni’s helped the most is his client Lil Wayne. As the Facebook page manager, Kazerooni strategically re-posts Lil Wayne’s Twitter commentary, as well as announcements about the rapper’s whereabouts.

“While he was in jail, we had an address so people could send him letters,” Kazerooni says. “He’d write back to some of these letters. I would post all that stuff on Facebook. We just kept everyone engaged throughout the whole process.”

That active engagement proves those 30 million fans aren’t idly watching the page. And this means the page is ripe for merchandising. Few of those posts contain product mentions, but the ones that do are moneymakers.

“I do everything the management needs to make sure we’re selling his products without bothering the fans,” Kazerooni says.

Wayne’s summer tour is promoted on his wall mostly by namechecking cities. A shoutout, for example, to Atlanta, can inspire some 7,000 comments. Wayne also hawks a brand of vanity cigars, and when Kazerooni occasionally posts about them on the page, local markets sell out.

He even won the page a Guinness World Record for the most “Likes” on a post in 24 hours.

Chris O’Hara is SVP of Marketing and Sales for Traffiq, a digital media optimization company. He has referred to the clutch of ad tech companies with sizable bank accounts from VC investment, not profits, as the walking dead. O’Hara believes that it’s only a matter of time before a massive fire sale begins in the industry.

Explain the idea of a walking-dead company?

Walking-dead companies are venture-funded companies that are sort of stumbling along revenue-wise, making enough money to stay afloat or surviving on their financing by having a relatively low burn rate. They’re not going to have a super successful exit anytime in the future. They may be very exciting, innovative companies, but they have a hard time getting VCs pumped up. Venture funds tend to place a lot of bets and hope that they get big wins from a small percentage of them. Like any investment vehicle, a VC’s portfolio has its mix of winners and losers, although the typical VC portfolio tends to be less diversified in terms of its industry focus. When I heard Jon Soberg of Blumberg Capital — it is a backer of Legolas, HootSuite, and DoubleVerify, among others — use the phrase “the walking dead,” it felt extremely appropriate. A lot of companies in the digital display landscape are running out of capital after three or four years and several rounds of financing  — and most of them will exit at low or zero multiple of valuation. Then again, smart investors like Grotech Ventures find a Living Social to invest in every now and again, and that is the kind of deal that can propel the value of an entire portfolio.

Are VCs beginning to cool in regards to investing in ad tech and social, in light of the economy?

On the contrary. I think the valuations of LinkedIn, Facebook and Living Social have the VC community excited, maybe even overexcited, to be honest. The recent Buddy Media announcement is just one example, raising $54 million to plump up its valuation to $500 million, and there are sure to more such valuations coming soon. I think what VCs aren’t too excited about is the amount of companies within the display landscape that are going to flame out or exit at fire sale prices. Unfortunately, according to Luma Partners banker Terence Kawaja, over half of the 35 deals in the last year didn’t produce a return on capital, and he expects that number to increase over time.

What are VCs doing right, or wrong, in ad tech?

So how should an investor, in this market, value an ad tech company?

I would give them a 1x-3x valuation, similar to a successful digital media agency — and only if they were showing strong profitability and something unique about their process which was repeatable. The problem with the current landscape is that the excitement has been driven in large part by many of the companies that I have just described — companies with more hype than real technology with a unique IP.

What should ad tech investors look out for?

I think investors have to watch out for a rapidly collapsing landscape, due to the social factor. You have an entire ecosystem built around audience targeting using third-party data. The problem? The companies with better and deeper first-party data have a lot more audience — like 750 million profiles for Facebook alone — than all of the companies in our landscape put together. And Facebook, LinkedIn and Google have just started to define their display advertising strategy. If audience targeting is as easy as it seems to be now, via Facebook, then what is the real value of many of those little logos in the Kawaja map?

Editor’s note:  The insights gained from this Q&A resonated with me because I see so many hustling music startups looking for funding.  From the investor standpoint (which you can read more about here), they don’t want to take chances on an industry in a decline or they flat out have burned on a few previous music investments.  However, I don’t see music startups as “Walking Dead.”  It’s merely a transition period and I’m hopeful for the amazing advances music folks are making in the tech space.

As an online marketing strategist, I continually come across business owners who rave about the number of visitors coming to their website. The irony is that website traffic alone doesn’t generate money.

I ask these business owners questions: Where is the website traffic coming from? What Web pages are visitors landing on the most? What percentage of visitors return to the site? How many visitors convert into customers?

Their lack of answers shows they’re concentrating on volume and not on quality, and I guarantee their sales are suffering as a result. It doesn’t matter how many people visit your website if those people are not the “right” people — the type of people who will buy something from you someday.

Good website analytics take the mystery out of wondering who’s visiting the company website and why. You don’t need to be an online marketing strategist to use them, either. There are plenty of website analytics packages for sale on the Web, but you can get started free through Google Analytics.

The Google service provides you with a line of code to plug into each of your website pages, and you can then start tracking. You can get a breakdown not only of how many visitors came to the website, but how long they stayed, what site they previously came from, what search terms they used to reach the website, and which pages they visited the most.

Here are five points to consider as you start delving into the numbers:

1. Do your website visitors already know you? The whole point of the website is to link you with potential new customers who have never heard of your business, not people who may be merely looking up your address. A well-designed website should only have a small percentage of visitors, maybe 5 percent, who have used the company’s name to find it.

2. Are you bringing in potential customers? Let’s say you’re a tennis gear provider. People who find your website searching for “tennis” probably aren’t going to help you. They likely won’t help you if they searched for “tennis racket.” You want the people who searched for “Dunlop tennis rackets,” or better yet “Dunlop Aerogel Titan.” They know what they want, and they will buy from you if you’re offering the best deal.

3. Does your social media presence work? If you spend 10 percent of your online marketing efforts on social media and 25 percent of your website visits come from Facebook or Twitter, you’re in good shape. Better yet, you can set up goal scenarios through Google Analytics. A goal might be that you want people to come from Twitter to see a post on your site that links to a promotional offer. You can then tweet the promotion and see how many people follow the path.

4. Are visitors bailing from your homepage? Google Analytics tells you your homepage’s bounce rate, the percentage of homepage visitors who never clicked on additional pages. If the bounce rate is more than 60 to 70 percent, you have a problem. The search terms your visitors are using to find the site tell you whether they’re the people you want. If they are the right type of visitors and they aren’t delving deeper into the site, then the blame goes on the homepage. It might not look professional, its content might not be compelling or the website might simply be confusing.

5. Are they looking at your product or service pages? The website is supposed to generate sales or interest in your services. If website visitors aren’t looking at the pages that allow this to happen, then your homepage is not doing its job. The homepage should be divided into decision-making paths that quickly separate visitors by their interests and lead them to the information they are looking for.

Most of all, don’t be intimidated by the analytics. Get your feet wet and decide what you really want. These numbers are the key to finding out whether your website is effectively generating business.

The End of Social Media: It looks like the social media era is winding to a close. That’s not to say that Web personalization will end or the consumption of content based on social graphs. That’s becoming a given. Think about Spotify. Logging onto the music service with Facebook credentials instantly gives users the ability to peruse and subscribe to their friends’ playlists. That kind of sharing would have been remarkable not long ago, but it’s now become expected. VC Mark McNamee makes the point that social is now a feature, not a product, so entrepreneurs should look elsewhere for opportunities. That’s particularly noteworthy because McNamee is a Facebook backer. He makes some other interesting points on media, including the notion that HTML5 will give publishers opportunities to make money outside of the display ad system.

Drowning in Ads: Thanks to social media, there has never been as many display advertising options as now. You’d think it would be the best of times for brands, able to cherry pick the impressions they want through exchanges and experiment with new vehicles gobbling up consumer attention. Not so, according to Shiv Singh, global head of digital at PepsiCo. The problem is, brands like Pepsi have no idea how to value brand impressions in a world of trillions of them. Attention has fractured to such a degree that brands like Pepsi are clearly overwhelmed. The complexity is ratcheted up because these impressions aren’t uniform: how can you compare a Foursquare check-in impression with a search link with a display unit on a news site? The Barbaran Group COO Rick Webb made a similar point when he said the Internet can pretty much stop creating ad inventory; it’s done plenty. It will be interesting to see if the solution to this problem is primarily technological (better measurement tools) or a return to basics with brands coalescing around key properties and outlets.

Google as Publisher: Google has long bristled at the suggestion that it’s a media company, but it’s now in the magazine business. This isn’t exactly an effort to compete with Conde Nast, however. Google is putting out Think Quarterly, a trade marketing effort that’s part of the company’s remarkable charm offensive on the media and marketing worlds. Not long ago Google was fairly aloof from these sectors, leaving it to Yahoo to lavish attention on Madison Avenue. Now Google’s in that game in a big way, setting up a bar in Cannes and hiring an array of agencies for its own marketing efforts. Think is a glossy (and digital companion) that will focuses not so much on Google’s products but the issues facing the broader industry. The first issue is themed around “innovation.” Check it out here.

Quote of the Day: Forrester Research analyst Michael Greene, in an interview with AdExchanger, doesn’t think ad exchange ad buying is going to help bring brands online en masse. “The ugly truth is that the digital media industry has created an environment that’s crappy for brands. Cluttered websites, lackluster ad formats, and poor measurement practices mean that it’s simply too difficult for brands to deliver and confirm the emotional response they are looking for.”

In Defense of Hierarchy: It’s refreshing in a time when everyone preaches the wisdom of flat organization — the flatter the better — to hear a progressive company leader sound the warning. Barbarian Group’s Webb knows firsthand how a company can unintentionally sow chaos by not paying attention to old-fashioned things like job titles and managing people closely. Webb’s experience is that despite what they might say, people want to be managed and appreciate the clarity that comes with job titles.

You can read more of Brian’s articles here.

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.

MTV recently released some findings from its study of Millennial Digital Habits. Nick Shore shares some tips for marketers that suggest underlying principles worth considering with other demographic slices as well. The short take is the need to keep up with the current communication habits of one’s target market and tailor efforts accordingly. Shore’s brief report shows that for MTV, research is a continuous process of paying close attention to their digital marketing efforts. Here are 5 tips:

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.