It is relatively cheap and easy to get music distributed online and be on the same exact playing field as the top selling artists – there’s no barrier to entry. Once the music is online though, it needs to be marketed. Ad agencies are better than labels at researching the target market, getting creative with the marketing, and testing the outcome. They have the experience of launching big brands’ campaigns and answering to all clients with their value added. Labels, on the other hand, treat is as a gamble:

An ad agency’s agenda is getting things in front of people that they might miss. They have to sell one car out of 50 that are coming out that season, and there’s no room for failure,” Mothersbaugh says. “Record companies have this whole other trajectory. They shoot all this stuff against the wall to see what sticks, and if they get one success out of a hundred bands, they high-five each other.”

I believe that the future of the music industry lies in a hybrid record label/ad agency. A single destination that could manage all sides of the music distribution and marketing equation. Stay tuned for more news on this topic!

Until now, licensing a track involves a lot of legwork – tracking down labels and rights-holders, negotiating rates, etc. Obviously nobody submitting a home video of their dog’s new trick would be willing to go through this. And the way it’s structured, it wouldn’t be worth a rights-holder’s time to license his track if it would only reach 50 viewers.

In my opinion this service or one like it could be a major revenue stream for artists in the future. People aren’t buying as much music for their personal collections, much of this music is being streamed for free anyway. At the same time, people are creating more and more content for their social media sites – their Youtubes, their Facespaces, whathaveyou. If someone can offer a cheap and easy way to legally add other media into your own media, that opens up a gigantic, and growing, customer base. It can even be a tentative solution to the “problem” of the mashup culture. Let the people mash up as many tracks as they want as long as they pay the minimal licensing fee for any track involved. If they start making actual money off of their work, other arrangements can be made.

Currently Friendly Music has about 35,000 songs in its library, none from any major labels. I wouldn’t doubt if the majors either utilize Rumblefish or create their own version of the company within the next year or two. Maybe Apple will offer a new “buy license” option in iTunes. This could be one of the gamechangers the industry has been looking for to start bringing in the profits again.

For those of you who need even further proof of the revealing nature of keywords look no further than Google.org’s Flu Trends project. Google realized that they could use their wealth of keyword data for the greater good by releasing search trends relating to flu keywords.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

They don’t say which keywords they monitor for this project but I’m sure it includes ones like “flu symptoms,” “headaches,” “fever,” etc. Check out a Google Trends search I ran for “flu symptoms.” You can see that the trends look very similar to their Flu Trends reports.
Google Flu Trends is remarkably accurate when compared to the CDC’s reports. The big difference is that Google’s reports are practically real-time whereas the CDC is 2 weeks or more delayed. I would also imagine that producing this is costing Google much less than it costs the CDC, being that they are using data that is already collected.

It will be interesting to see how seriously this innovation will be taken by the medical community. If Google decides to release more in-depth information then we could start to determine exactly what symptoms are affecting the public and the severity of these symptoms – FYI, this is already possible using Google’s Adwords Tool if you have the time and the knowhow. I am also curious to see where else they will take this concept. People search Google for every topic imaginable and useful trends can be released in any number of areas – presidential public approval, stock market activity, awareness of issues, etc.

I know, spreadsheets aren’t typically mentioned in the same sentence as sex, drugs, and rock&roll (and neither has AC/DC for about 15 years), but this is worth checking out. Download the excel file here or if you’re feeling lazy just watch the youtube video below.

The internets is ripe for mashing up different technologies and this is a great example of how, these days, a new artform can be created overnight. Not to say they’re all going to have staying power, but they are worth noting. Surprisingly, this video has created a moderate buzz in the viral video-sphere, with about 160k views on Youtube as of writing, 3 days after they released the video. This seems like it would be the kind of video to gain slow and steady views from the interoffice email chain crowd.