By Ruben Lone
During this weekend’s MIDEM music festival in Cannes, France, 6400 participants from 74 countries converge to discuss the state of the music industry and its forthcoming trends and technologies. Lyor Cohen, MIDEM speaker and former Warner Music Group CEO, announced his newest entrepreneurial venture that will function as a toolset for A&Rs scouting new artists and bands on Twitter. Called 300, Cohen’s new label and “content company” will be distributed by Atlantic Records, reuniting the CEO with his former Warner peers. Also involved in the venture are Todd Moscowitz and Kevin Liles, successful industry pros who’ve both worked with Cohen at Warner and Def Jam in its heyday.
300 marks an interesting transition in the music industry’s integration with social media. Most reports of how these A&R “tools” will actually function are vague, but Cohen has enlisted the help of both music business veterans as well as data mining and analytic experts, alluding to a machine-driven scouring for new artists on Twitter’s platform. While it doesn’t seem like Cohen’s technologies are intended to replace the role of the traditional A&R (which to be honest, is a sadly neglected and underpaid role at major record labels), 300 has implications of a future where machines are analyzing data and picking series of artists based on metadata, tags, and social media relevance.
Twitter’s ubiquity and purposeful design limitations make it easy to dissect, and the number ratios between followers and tweets are generally good indicators of rising popularity and virality. Hopefully, the 300′s algorithms will differentiate between artists whose social media presence is organic and/or viral and the hype hordes who trade follow-for-follow on Twitter in an attempt to gain more visibility–a case where having more followers is a clear misrepresentation of purported popularity. Human fact-checking will ideally keep mediocrity from slipping through the digital cracks, but well-informed discovery still requires a degree of keen research. Skepticism aside, Lyor Cohen does seem to be focused on putting the artist before the label and the business, and his past in artist development and management speaks to a industry where attention was paid to new music and to the world in which it existed.
With backing from several investors including Google, a music industry veteran like Cohen is hardly taking an entrepreneurial risk, especially with partnerships fully designed to support a new A&R toolset in the digital age. Let’s just hope new artists don’t overload their Twitter presences with fluff and vapid popularity schemes in attempts to get signed. If 300 leverages the dedication of diligent, innovative artists, it could very well be a tool that streamlines an oft-complicated and esoteric element of the scouting process.
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