freshbreakfast

hey freshhawk. first of all, I'm totally jealous of your handle. Second, I would say I'm not in any of those camps I define. I'm in the "crowd patronage" camp ;-).

I think music will always have hits and superstars, whether the gatekeeper is radio or internet. What we call "viral" today will be upgraded to how we think of "hit" today.

Overall though, I'm more excited about the "middle class" of musicians the new era of music industry can support. I personally think maintaining a profitable and real relationship with your fans will require a lot less overhead in the future. And, they can go direct to fan, which is beneficial for independent artists, imo.

I personally hate anything that "feels" like charity to the artist, I don't think that's sustainable. Even though I call this theoretical model "crowd patronage", I feel it would only work if the fan "feels" like he's getting more than some altruistic warm feelings of supporting something. They should also feel the real value of relationship access. Just the illusion of having a closer relationship to artist will only enhance the feeling of supporting the artist. But at a minimum, there must be that value back of some sort of relationship reciprocation. Does that make sense?

I personally define "music industry" as whatever generates revenue for artists and their managers. I do agree that there's a lot of old growth in the current ecosystem of the music industry that's inevitably going to die off.

Hey guys, I wrote this thing, and ready to discuss it here on HN. Come at me with your best shot!

If, against all odds, this scheme works and becomes acceptable, it can't last too long before competitors offering different kinds of service/values copy the same scheme. At which point, it becomes a real estate grab, and before you know it, this new meta layer of ad-serving apps become the ad network itself. I'm not sure that's good thing.

The first adjective that pg used was "determined". It's also essentially saying the same thing as his last sentence. I'm guessing that's not an accident.

The latest post from Mark Mulligan, a former research director from Forrester and musician, who I personally think is one of the smarter pundits on the music/tech industry. Definitely belongs on HN.

viewcount would seem to me to be a tried and true motivator, especially for creators, no?

If the Segway was about a thousand bucks, way smaller, and more thrilling to ride... well, I'd buy it.

Hey Joey! I love earbits! I caught some of your interview with Ian Rogers on youtube, so it's really cool you found this!

So yeah, I didn't want to get too specific with what not to do, because I feel like things change so quickly on facebook. Also, I don't really don't know the # what's a good/bad frequency. I think in general it's best to go at least a few hours in between posts, but at the same time if it's awesome, timely content, then you should post it regardless.

And yeah, the rules are certainly different for brands as it is for bands. In fact, it's different from band-to-band: how loyal your fans are, genres and their cultural norms, age/demo of fans, how "hot" the band is, etc. I feel like if Bieber or Gaga or Amanda Palmer or Bob Dylan were to post a status update a minute, they could get away with it because their fans would eat it up regardless.

Long way of saying, I don't really know the answer!

That's a good point, I know a few tricks to increase or capture likes. Actually my company's FB platform, Tracksby, has a good way to capture likes. I focused so much on engaging the current audience that I completely forgot about some new lead tactics. It was getting a little tl/dr though. Next post!

Hey guys this "guide" is sort of a work in progress for me, would appreciate any other suggestions you guys have in this here Hacker News comments. Also, I'm always looking for good examples of facebook pages done right, music or other.

Freshbreakfast here, my real name is Bryan Kim and I wrote this post. I want to thank my fellow hacker news'ers for the mind-blowing discussion in this here comments. Like literally mind-blowing stuff, I'm still Q-tipping the grey matter out of my ear holes. Definitely stealing a lot of these points for my next post :)

:) Thanks man, means a lot coming from you. And great great post, really a privilege getting to peer into your thought process during a moment we nominally shared.

Dalton, I don't know if you remember this, but I used to a major imeem fanboy, wrote a personal blog (freshbreakfast dot com) to count the ways I loved imeem, the links for which I spammed to team/all/dalton/steve/gina/matt@imeem.com.

Anyhow, I ended up becoming employee #2 at Ustream. So I was at that presentation, doing them a favor running a private live stream for the CEOs that couldn't make it. Not to sound creepy, but I observed for your reactions quite a bit at that Seqouia meeting, and I even introduced myself to you after the presentation. It's true, your mind seemed to be elsewhere, but you were still very kind.

And if that many full circles aren't enough for ya, today we're both trending on front page of Hacker News :-). This one's mine: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4080074

I'm also big on performance and interpretation of classical music. I've compromised my quality standards on every genre of music except classical music, which I still revert back to my CD collection. Sadly, I feel classical's aging audience hasn't created the forcing function for that industry to get organized regarding the categorization and distribution of their catalogue online, which is a damn shame. Having said that, it takes a certain tuned ear to pick out the world of difference in the performance and interpretation between pieces that are compositionally identical. I personally feel you need a certain threshold of fidelity to distinguish those subtleties.

Because of this, I find I listen to less and less classical music over the years, simple because CD device players are starting to disappear from my life. For example, I'm typing on a laptop right now that doesn't even have a CD drive (Macbook Air). I literally have to go out of my way to listen to classical music in the way I want to hear it. It's sort of sad, really.

Agreed. The catalogue thing is annoying. But I do remember it took a while for iTunes to have a complete catalogue as well. I feel like eventually though that problem should self-correct for subscription based model over time, as it increasingly becomes the de-facto medium to consume music. Either way, I suppose we'll find out the answer in a few years ;-)

Hey I wrote the blog post, and I'm firmly in bucket 2. I frikkin love music. If it was up to me, we'd all go back to vinyl bumping through wide cones set in heavy oak. I just don't think we define the market because we're so in the minority. As sad as it might be, I think convenience wins over quality everytime, so bucket 1 will define the market. I'm not trying to define the market, I'm just trying to predict it... so it is what it is.

The "music industry" is whatever the market and enabling technology defines it to be. Before the 1950's, selling sheet music defined the "music industry" for decades. Before that, patronage by European royalty defined the "music industry".

But I agree that at the heart of this "experience" is the music itself, and the performance that manifests it. But I still feel music is beyond the products that have defined it as a record industry. Music is a primordial organizing principle of human societies, always has been. In a lot of ways, I think these future direct-to-fan experiential products return music to the primordial function it served for humanity, and all that entails. And sure, selling it seems sort of cheesy now, but that's a zeitgeist sentiment, which can and will change. Remember, 70-100 years ago, it was cheesy to sell recorded music. Lot of world renowned musicians, orchestras and performers refused to be recorded, for some of the same sentiments you share here today about "BS 'experience'" products.

The passive/active experience angle is an interesting way to look at it. I wrote the blog post, but obviously I'm a music lover who usually consumes in a very proactive way, always looking for new music. But I still think the passive experience type of listener is actually more likely to fall for the subscription/cloud model, in that it's so much more convenient than downloading. The 10 or so seconds it takes to actually download the song and sync into iTunes is going to be more and more unacceptable for the younger and younger kids.

On early adopter planet? Which you can say is the "3-5 years in the future" planet? ;-)

According to sales though, digital downloads of music is still seeing year-over-year growth. It's crutching the record industry right now. But I agree with your overall sentiment, I think sales will soon catch up (or down?) to what is going to be an obvious consumer behavior shift. Paying for music downloads will soon ride out the backside of the late adopter curve soon enough.

I think your skepticism is correct if you go strictly follow logic along the "instagram for video" metaphor. Which is natural, everyone wants to make that corollary right now given Instagram's recent successes.

But I wonder if the metaphor is limiting. How about "Youtube for mobile"? As more and more media consumption happens in mobile, can't we expect consumers to extend their patience and habits for longer formats?