Announces the world’s first & only enhanced A&R platform

Music Xray is a platform used by over 600 music industry professionals to receive song submissions from artists, acts, & rights holders. The company is announcing the launch of a new song to opportunity matching service called S₂O that automatically pairs songs to opportunities.

Artists simply upload their songs at MusicXray.com and wait to be alerted when appropriate opportunities for their songs are identified. The new service is completely free and marks the first time music analysis technology has been combined with other talent-identifying tools to form the world’s first and only enhanced A&R platform.

In late 2009 Music Xray began enlisting top industry professionals to conduct their A&R activities via the site. Today, the platform is used by several major labels, dozens of independent labels, license agencies, radio stations, advertising agencies, music supervisors, managers, promoters and even influential music bloggers who take submissions from artists vying to have their music featured.

“It’s a great way to conduct A&R.” said Alex Torrez head of Torrez Music Group in Nashville who previously held a position in the A&R department of Columbia Records and who now sources music for many of the top labels and artists. “It’s easier, more organized and the quality of submissions is higher on Music Xray, making it more rewarding to evaluate acts and their music”.

Music Xray does not track the deals that occur between artists and industry professionals but a “Success “Stories” section of the company’s website lists some of the deals of which the company has learned. Todd Gross, manager and father of emerging musician/performer Mary Sarah added, “Music Xray has enabled us to access some of the top people in the music industry more quickly and easily than would have been possible before. As a result, Mary Sarah is being looked at by several top companies and we’re discussing several potential deals.”

Artists sign up on the site to receive weekly emails alerting them of the new submission opportunities that have been added to the listings over the previous week. Currently that email reaches nearly 100,000 artists and the number grows by several thousand each week. Additionally, Music Xray offers artists sleek song presentation packs (called Music Xrays) that enable artists to showcase their songs for free together with the song’s lyrics, artist bio, a video, and even graphs that show how an artist is performing across all the social networks and Internet radio.

“Millions of songs are created and posted to the web each year. The music industry needs the ability to evaluate them for commercial purposes and to efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff.” said Mike McCready, co-founder and CEO of the company. “Music Xray harnesses all the capabilities of the social web, music intelligence technologies, and collective expert knowledge to help the industry spot the hottest new talent and the best songs first.

“In addition to doing deals with industry professionals, artists use Music Xray to get professional feedback on their music, advice and career coaching.”

About Music Xray

Music Xray (http://musicxray.com) is the world’s first and only enhanced A&R platform. Its an angel and venture-backed company co-founded by Mike McCready & Tracie Reed who pioneered Hit Song Science, the first commercial application of music analysis technology to predict the success of hit songs. The New York based company brings together into one platform best-of-breed technologies to help the industry efficiently receive, manage and provide feedback on song submissions, interact with artists and discover brand new music.

What I’ve learned is that nothing replaces the expert human ear when it comes to A&R. However, technology has emerged that can enhance the music industry’s human skills in much the same way a medical doctor’s skills are enhanced by the X-ray machine and other modernities. The X-ray machine doesn’t do the job of the doctor. It just gives the doctor additional information upon which better decisions can be made. Today, no one would consider seeing a doctor who doesn’t use state of the art technology.

So whether it has been using computers to help predict hit songs or developing an A&R platform that harnesses state-of-the-art technology to help the industry perform better, solving the music filtering problem has been my passion for a long time.

I’ve been thinking about a clever way to describe Music Xray’s new Song to Opportunity (S₂O) Matching system and the best way I’ve come up with (so far) is that:

It turns your songs into opportunity magnets.

Or maybe it’s the match.com for songs and opportunities to find each other.

Maybe it’s the Pandora for A&R…

However we describe it, I think it’s pretty cool. You upload your songs for free and then sit back and wait to be alerted when an industry professional is seeking a song like yours. Give it a shot. The more songs you upload the more alerts you will get.

Here’s how it works:

1. Some of the hundreds of music industry professionals who use Music Xray to find songs and acts have given us a few “seed” songs. That is, songs that have a musical style and sound similar to what they would like to have submitted to them. For example, if they are seeking a new single for Britney Spears they might give us a few of her songs plus an additional song in the style and sound they are seeking.

2. Music Xray uses software to analyze the acoustic properties and underlying mathematical patterns of the “seed” songs and compares them to those in songs that have been uploaded for free into the company’s system by artists and rights holders.

3. Music Xray notifies the artists when there is a match between what professionals are seeking and the artists’ songs.

We’re not making any formal announcements nor really talking much about this while the service is in beta. Nevertheless, we’re thrilled that Music Xray is pushing the envelope. It’s the first enhanced A&R platform in the world. It harnesses cutting edge technology to enable the industry to filter through large quantities of music to find the most appropriate songs for each opportunity.

This is A&R on steroids.

Click here for more information.

Michael C. Ruppert makes a very compelling case as to why the world’s entire economic, social and political structures are on the verge of failure. It’s hard to poke holes in his arguments. Is he a crackpot? Is he a genius? I walked away with the unsettled feeling that he’s a man who knows how to connect the dots and is a talented critical thinker.

I can sometimes get a bit obsessive about things and my interests outside of my work can go in spurts so I need to let this documentary / interview settle a little bit before I start making any life decisions based on the learning I did but it has already made me start thinking about my financial positions, exposure and overall preparedness for the future.

That said, in the first part of the interview he lays out his theory of peak oil. Peak Oil is when we realize that we’ve gone thruogh about half the available resource and that from this point forward oil production will start to decline. In fact, he says it’s already declined 9% and will continue to decline further. He backs that up with several other compelling arguments and then debunks the arguments supporting claims that other possible sources of energy could replace oil. They all have fatal flaws, according to Michael Ruppert. So, once he leads the viewer through the horrible thought that the price of oil and its scarcity as a resource will begin to cause economic structures to break down (and soon) he then moves the viewer on to economic policy and politics, finally bringing the solution back home saying, “It’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to survive the transition from the system we’ve always known and the one we’re going to have to figure out.

I won’t go into evrything he says but if you’ve seen his movie or read one of his books I’d like to invite you to the comments section below this post to discuss what you think. This movie is already being acclaimed.

This is from Variety “Less wake-up call than four-alarm fire, “Collapse” forces its audience to witness the testimony of Michael Ruppert, an independent writer and researcher who believes that everything — industrial civilization, at least — is falling apart, soon to vanish completely. In other words, it makes countless other political documentaries look like episodes of “Teletubbies.”"

Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times says, “Every time I’d start to think Ruppert was a deluded crackpot, he’d reel me back in, grabbing me by the throat with a burst of seemingly persuasive analysis. He poses his oil-collapse scenario in simple, hard-to-refute logic. “Saudi Arabia has 25% of the oil reserves on the planet,” he explains in a soothing, almost hypnotic voice. “Why, if Saudi Arabia has all these untapped reserves on shore, are they moving heavily into offshore drilling? If it’s 5, 10 or 15 times more expensive to drill offshore than land, doesn’t that tell you that Saudi Arabia knows that they’ve no more oil to find?”

New York Entertainment says, “None of the we’re-totally-screwed documentaries we’ve seen over the past few years could’ve prepare us for the terrors unleashed on our minds in Chris Smith’s riveting new documentary Collapse”.

I’m interested in knowing what people who have seen this documentary think k about it and how it changes what they are going to do with their lives.

Here’s the trailer:

Artists will also be able to utilize similar widgets like the ones we have at MusicXray in order to promote themselves on Facebook, MySpace, their own blog or other sources of promotion. This is a good move for ReverbNation and a step in the right direction for independent artists.

Read the article here.

Erik Qualman has been doing his homework on the social media phenomenon that has been spreading faster than (insert your own tasteless swine flu metaphor here).

His new book called Socialnomics comes out later this month. I think you’ll be hearing a lot about it in the days to come because there is no hotter topic in business today than how to leverage social media to build communities around brands and then leverage them into revenue. The thinking is that as we build out our online personas – migrate toward certain online groups centered around our interests, our likes, dislikes, opinions and friends – products and services will find their way to us rather than we having to go out to find them. It changes the entire nature of advertising and how companies strive to create brand awareness and loyalty. When word of mouth and peer endorsements become the primary means by which products are sold, making a better product and having a sterling reputation becomes the absolute king of all currencies. Business school teaches us that good will is hard to quantify but having it in spades among your target market has never been more important.

The realization that a competitor who is socially networked better than you will eat your lunch has started a stampede of businesses and brands that are jumping on the social media bandwagon even faster than individual users were adopting Facebook last year – when 100 million users joined in just 9 months, according to Qualman’s statistics. He points out that 34% of bloggers (and there are over 200,000,000 blogs) post opinions about products and brands.

When you start to contemplate the impact of the statistics he cites and sources in his book you begin to understand the rapid shift in how business is seeing and reacting to the social media cascade. Erik discusses how two of the best marketers of the 20th century were Dale Carnegie and David Ogilvy. He says that today’s consumers want to be related to “more in the Carnegie way”. They want to be listened to and engaged in a dialog and not just hyped at. It no longer matters what you say about yourself. In fact, Qualman highlights that only 14% of people trust advertisers yet 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. What matters is what others say about you.

Another interesting point Qualman makes is how Internet search is evolving to the extent that Google does not see its competition as Bing or Ask but rather Twitter and Facebook. I experienced this personally just the other day when my company’s website went down. Our head of technology told me it was due to our DNS host having an outage. I knew if that were the case there would be a number of other companies experiencing the same thing. I Googled their name and came up empty handed. I then typed in a Twitter search and it came back with several tweets by other users complaining about the same issue and asking if others were experiencing the problem. Instantly, I was connected with kindred spirits with whom if nothing else, we could gripe to each other until the service was restored. In this case, the company missed the opportunity to monitor Twitter for their brand name. Had they been paying attention they could have been alerted to the issue quicker and they could have directly responded to those of us whose business was disrupted by the outage to reassure us it was being handled.

People and advertisers are losing all control over their own message. Making that point for me are next generation social networks like Blerp, Fleck and a new one called Layers that launched their second beta version just this week. (disclaimer: I am involved with this company). They enable their users to place text, videos, images and highlights on top of any existing webpage and then share their creation with their friends or with the world. The implications of this new vertical web are astounding. Imagine everyone losing control of the content on their own websites. If you can visit any company’s website and then request to see all the “layers” that have been created over the page you’ll likely see praise, criticism and even offers from competitors. Entire mass conversations about a company can be taking place on a layer, right over the company’s website and if the company isn’t monitoring that it will miss the opportunity to rebut, persuade and offer its own point of view. Governments like Iran’s can shut down Twitter and Facebook within the borders of their country but could they control layered content right on their own government’s website without turning off all access to the Internet within its borders?

Qualman offers that today, 80% of companies now use LinkedIn (a social network dedicated to business networking) as a primary tool to find new talent. It’s getting to the point you can’t even compete to get a job if you’re not versed in the ins and outs of social networking. That doesn’t seem to be a problem for most. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is females aged 55 to 65. That’s probably because most other demographics just don’t have that much more growth in them. With 170 million users, if Facebook were a country it would be the forth largest in the world (another statistical gem from Qualman’s book).

Others are more skeptical of social media’s ability to sell products and it must be said that there’s a difference between social media advertising and building real communities around your brand. Many companies have been successful at generating a little buzz around their product for a short time by offering special Twitter promotions and giving away prizes to Twitter users who use their brand in tweets. But it’s companies like Coca-Cola, who have built a Facebook community with over 3.5 million members (compared to Pepsi’s paltry-by-comparison 226,000 member community) who are playing the game to win.

In a promotional video for his book (posted below), Qualman dazzles us with facts and figures about the new connected world in which we live. Many of the facts he hurls are startling and some just leave you wondering how everything changed so quickly. I spoke with Erik Qualman for this piece and you can tell by his passion and the way he speaks about social media that he’s not a dabbler. He eats, drinks, sleeps and truly lives this stuff. News of his book’s imminent release is just starting to spread and it’s already getting traction from traditional media. I’m sure he’ll be booked on the talk shows and will make the rounds of cable news. Traditional media is far from dead and it’s very important for getting mass exposure, selling books and launching careers into orbit. However, Erik’s 15 megabytes of fame will be well on its way before any of that happens. His video has already been viewed nearly 8,000 times at the time of this posting (it was 6,500 when I started writing). Go to YouTube and watch that number skyrocket. By the time Erik’s book comes out in stores on August 26th it could already be a bestseller (you can pre-order it on Amazon now).

Erik says he hopes this book is just a vehicle to help him continue to do what he loves to do, evangelize social media and continue to follow the trends and evolution of online technologies.

As you know, it’s hard enough to get traction for music you absolutely love and in which you have a vested interest but it can be simply awkward when an artist you know and like but whose music isn’t compelling is asking you to introduce them to someone in your network. You feel somewhat obligated but you know that each time you cash in an introduction you are spending the good will and personal capital you’ve built up. If the person you send the music to doesn’t like it, you also damage your credibility for the next time you pass some music along.

This is one of the toughest issues all music industry professionals (MIPs) deal with. I talk with MIPs all the time who tell me they get cornered by their friends who want them to come over to their house and listen to their high school kid perform or they get handed CDs and sent MP3 to the point they can’t even keep track of them let alone listen to and review them. It’s not only the labels that get overwhelmed with submissions. It’s anyone who might have a contact at a label, with a top producer, a music supervisor or who has worked in the music scene and has a professional opinion that can help someone. One guy told me, “I have a friend who is an accountant but he doesn’t review my taxes as a favor. He gets paid a lot of money for his professional advice but people always want mine in exchange for a hamburger while I listen to their nephew play guitar.”

This is one of the challenges we hope to solve by rolling out phase two of Music Xray. You may have seen phase one which was the introduction of attractive and useful song presentation packages. Here’s an example of one. Artists / Song owners are getting them for their songs at $2 each because they help measure and monitor the traction a song is getting in the market and they can even help predict the traction a song can get if properly promoted. But another reason is that Music Xrays are being accepted as the preferred submission vehicle in the industry. Instead of filling their brief cases, tote bags and the floors of their car back seats with CDs and clogging their in-boxes with emailed MP3s, MIPs are asking those who want to submit music to them to simply email them the link to their songs’ Music Xrays.

But phase two of our business is actually a platform that enables MIPs to set up profiles and Music Xray drop boxes. MIPs can choose to charge a small fee to accept submissions. They can even set themselves up to review / critique music and provide advice and coaching to artists for a larger fee. The platform is in beta and has limited functionality compared to what it will have but the idea is to enable MIPs to painlessly accept, discover, manage and review music.

Imagine the next time you’re at a conference, a gig or run into your friend whose cousin’s girlfriend is in a band. Instead of taking the CD you can hand them your card with your Music Xray dropbox URL on it. You can tell them you get too much music to keep track of so you’ve set up a dropbox for each level of service request. One for just a listen. One for a listen and some feedback. One for people to submit songs to you for a specific project you’re working on such as a movie… maybe even a free submission dropbox for people for whom you want to do favors.

Take a look here. We’re still in beta so the sign up process is not quite yet self-provisioning but if you fill out this form we’ll contact you and get you all set up.

“It’s not show friends. It’s show business. ” – Bob Sugar (Jay Moore): Jerry McGuire (1996)

What will happen to the major labels?

The labels were only ever going to survive as long as they remained the powerful gatekeepers between the artists and a mass audience. To the artists, they are like bouncers at an exclusive nightclub on a January night in Manhattan; you suck up to them while you seethe at them for making you stand out in the cold. The longer you wait, the more resentful you get (yeah, been there).

As I discussed here before, technology is making it possible for an artist to post their song on the Web and immediately make it available to everyone. However, there are still no great solutions for making “everyone” aware of your song and motivating them to go get it — even if you’re giving it away. The labels are still much better than anyone else at mass marketing music because they still have the necessary money, relationships and other resources to do it. Music consumption is on the rise but music “sales” are faltering, so over time the labels are draining their coffers and soon won’t be able to even mass market effectively. They will be relegated to making money on the value of their legacy catalog of music — licensing The Rolling Stones and U2 to film and other similar opportunities.

The label groups aren’t resting on their laurels however. They see the inevitable endgame approaching and they have decided to address the situation with a multi-pronged strategy in hopes of delaying the end of their traditional business model as long as possible.

1. They extract multi-million dollar fees from music start-up companies that want to license their catalog.

Over the past few years a lot of venture capital firms and angel investors have poured money into music start-up companies that either stream major label music over the Web or offer it for download. Just to get started, Warner Music Group, SonyBMG, EMI and Universal demand millions of dollars from these start-ups upfront. So, the money has been flowing from the venture capital firms to the start-ups right into the pockets of the major labels. In many cases, it then turns out that these start-up firms pay more money than their business models can support and they’re going belly up long before ever turning a profit. A high profile start-up in this space called Spiral Frog was the most recent victim of this type of death. An interesting article about that can be read here.

1. They take an equity stake in new music companies.

Sometimes the labels will forgo a multi-million dollar advance and will even invest money in a new company if they believe enough in the new business. Warner, for example invested $20 million into a music start-up called Lala despite previously having sued the company for copyright infringement. All four major label groups have taken a stake in MySpace Music. However, even these companies’ business models are considered to be flawed and headed for what the popular TechCrunch blog that covers this space calls the “dead pool”. Although it’s more than likely MySpace Music will figure something out before getting there due to being backed by NewsCorp.

1. They do 360 deals with artists

As discussed previously, this is where the labels take a much larger stake in the artists’ revenue streams than they used to. Not only do they collect when the artist sells music. They also collect when the artist sells concert tickets, does product endorsements and sells T-shirts and other merchandise.

Between these strategies and the strength of their catalogs, these companies will survive. But in all likelihood they will promote fewer new acts with new music. The risk to return ratio just won’t be as attractive as their catalog businesses.

EMI is a good example of how bad things have gotten for the majors. In 2007 it was purchased by a capital firm called Terra Firma, headed by Guy Hands. The company brought in former Google chief information officer Douglas Merrill to head up its digital strategy. This past month both Hands and Merrill exited after Terra Firma had to write down a $1.78 billion loss on their investment. Now, EMI is trying to right itself and figure out what to do going forward.

So this all boils down to the question; what do artists and songwriters have to do today to increase their prospects of making a living — if not a killing?

The good news is there are a lot of things artists can do. The bad news is that the days of exploding stardom are going the way of the CD and the major labels. Sure, they can get their 15 megabytes of fame doing something that gets lots of attention on YouTube or by getting caught up in a prostitution scandal with a sitting governor like Ashley Alexandra Dupre did. Then, she sold a bunch of her music on a DIY music sales site called AmieStreet. But that didn’t last. Her music wasn’t appealing enough to enough people to sustain a career in music. Of course, that’s not the path an artist will take if they’re serious about building long term fans and having a real career.

Today, artists and their managers have to do it all. They have to be their own promotion and marketing team. They have to network, build relationships and nurture their fans.

Most of all, they must come to terms with the fact that no one is going to invest their time and money into the artists’ music and careers unless they can see a path to getting a return on that investment. That path is still taking shape in the new music landscape; often referred to as Music 2.0. It’s still called show business and not show friends so investors have to have a stomach for risk. Artists can’t afford to be bitter about having to do it all themselves and I speak to many who unfortunately are. Artists and their managers have the most to gain in today’s business models and they get to keep a lot more of their rights and income than ever before. So, if they are diligent and their music is good they can earn a very decent living.

Online tools that artists can use are changing the landscape very quickly. Radiohead left their label and released their album on their own and used many online tools to track their own progress. A few weeks ago Counting Crows announced they too are leaving their label to go it alone. Granted, these are established bands with brand names. Few artists get to start out on their own with the same advantages but soon we are going to start seeing bands “breaking” all over the Web and bands and their managers need to especially make friends with analytic tools that will help them find their market and then focus like lasers on it.

These analytic services are going to be absolutely key to their future. They can’t get where they’re going if they don’t know where they’re starting from and they can’t correct their course if they aren’t able to see how (or if) their promotion and marketing efforts are working.

Nothing can replace good music, charisma, playing lots of gigs, having a good street team of fans who help artists spread the word and nurturing a growing fan base. However, there are so many tools now directly available to artists to help them do even these things that didn’t exist just a few years ago that leveraging them is a must if artists are going to succeed in the new landscape.

I’ll leave it here for now, but for good measure I’m throwing in a list of things artists should be doing and if you know any you can pass this list along:

First, they must get attention. Money will follow.

1. Artists should sign up to as many online social networks as possible where they can post theirs or their band’s profile and music. They need to network with fans and similar bands on those sites. They include but are not limited to:
   a. MySpace
   b. Facebook
   c. iMeem
   d. Broadjam
   e. Mog
   f. Reverb Nation
   

2. They need to get valuable feedback and analytic information on their music from focus groups and real industry professionals
   a. SoundOut
   b. Music Xray (my company)
   c. They should use Google Analytics to measure activity on their website
   

3. They should submit their songs to real industry opportunities, song contests and gigs
   a. SonicBids
   b. Music Xray (still my company)
   c. Great American Song Contest
   d. International Songwriting Competition
   e. John Lennon Songwriting Contest
   

4. They should distribute their music to all digital retail outlets
   a. TuneCore
   b. The Orchard
   c. IODA Alliance
   d. Reverb Nation
   

5. They should consider “pre-clearing” their music for sync licensing (like Getty Images but for songs)
   a. Pump Audio (actually owned by Getty Images)
   b. AudioSocket
   c. Sir Groovy
   

6. They should consider placing their songs on sites that enable their fans to “pitch in” to fund their recording and marketing.
   a. Sellaband
   b. SliceThePie
   

7. Especially they should stay up to date on the new music space. There are some very good blogs and newsletters they should be reading.
   a. Music Think Tank
   b. Hypebot
   c. Mog
   d. Lefsetz Letter
   e. MI2N
   

What is happening to the music industry?

In short, the traditional music industry has been beaten, battered and completely transformed by a perfect storm of new technologies. It actually started with the introduction of the CD back in 1982. Music was digitized and encoded on the CDs which we all bought to replace and enhance our vinyl collections. Then, along came the MP3 which enabled us to compress those CD song files down to manageable sizes and file sharing began. The next nail in the coffin of the traditional music industry was the emergence of MP3 players led by the iPod and digital retail led by iTunes. Once people became used to that, who wanted to carry around a CD case? Finally, the plummeting cost and decreasing technical knowledge required to make a decent sounding recording sounded the death knell for the major music labels, the backbone of the traditional music industry.

The music labels were society’s music filters. They were responsible for finding the best talent, nurturing it, promoting it and distributing it all over the world. But the labels were also incredibly inefficient. For each act they successfully promoted and on which they turned a profit, there were dozens, even hundreds of failed acts and artists in whom the labels had invested and had lost money. Few industries would have been able to operate with such numbers but the music industry had thrived under this system; mostly due to the large amounts of cash that were made with every success. With new technologies affecting almost every aspect of the ecosystem (from song creation to mass distribution) the labels could do little to prevent the demise of their business. Seeing opportunity before them, entrepreneurs emerged with ideas about how the whole industry could be run more efficiently.

Today, music is increasingly sold as digital files that you download to your computer and then put on your mobile device such as your iPod. Other services are increasingly enabling you to stream music on demand. Under that arrangement, you never actually own any music. You simply have access to all of it all the time. Physical music retail stores are going out of business and soon won’t exist as stand-alone shops.

Anyone can record and upload a song.

On the music creation side of the value chain, the cost of recording and producing a song has fallen through the floor. What used to cost tens of thousands of dollars and had to be done in a professional recording studio can now be done in a bedroom on a laptop computer. This is a great development that enables creative talent to emerge even in the absence of musical ability or even any musical knowledge. On the other hand, it has caused a veritable avalanche of new music to pour onto the web — much of it of dubious quality. Even the largest physical music stores couldn’t carry much more than 10,000 titles. That’s nothing compared to what’s now available at the click of a mouse. MySpace alone is said to host over 10 million acts. Other sites that cater to artists have hundreds of thousands of bands signed up to their services.

It is a jungle out there! How can the fans find the needles in the haystack they want to hear? How can the artists locate their future fans? It’s the fundamental problem the labels were solving but now they can’t do it effectively. There’s too much music for them to even try to filter effectively and nobody wants to buy their CDs anyway, so how can that work even be funded? The sale of digital files isn’t even coming close to compensating for the loss of revenue on the sale of physical goods so now there’s much less money to compensate for the labels’ inherent inefficiencies. In fact, most insiders believe recorded music will cease to be paid for by the end consumer. It will instead either be free (built into the cost of marketing other products) or built into the cost of other services you pay for such as your Internet and cable TV bill or your mobile phone service. It will feel free and the actual revenue generated from the distribution of recorded music will be a fragment of what it has been historically. So, where does that leave us?

Fortunately, it’s all going to be OK. There are dozens of emerging companies that are taking on these challenges and there are some really good ideas. It’s interesting to see the variety of approaches. Most agree that the currency of exchange for recorded music will be the attention of the fans instead of their money. If an artist can get attention they will be able to sell tickets to their shows, license songs to soundtracks and get money for endorsing products. The labels held the key to getting access to big opportunities but now the artists and their managers have to find other avenues.

In spite of the reduced barriers to music creation and access to easily have your song distributed to all of the digital outlets (see services such as TuneCore or The Orchard) it still almost always requires mass exposure in order for a song to really take hold and begin to earn some money. That means that once a song is created, it still requires enormous effort, time and resources to “push” and promote that song within the industry. Songs must still come to the attention of someone who has an opportunity. The gatekeepers, such as music supervisors in Hollywood, ad agencies, program directors and video game designers remain and will continue to remain in place playing a valuable role.

So, real change will come by leveling the playing field and by giving individual artists equal access to mass-exposure opportunities. This is the challenge we’re trying to solve with our new Music Xray service. (Pardon the plug but I can’t describe the solutions to the industry’s toughest challenges without describing our own solution since it represents our best thinking and thus my opinion).

Think of Music Xray as a kind of YouTube for songs in that each Music Xray represents one song. Each Music Xray get s a unique URL (just like a YouTube video) and each Music Xray can be embedded elsewhere around the web (again, just like a YouTube video). But that’s where the comparison with YouTube ends because a Music Xray is more than just an embeddable song player. Each Music Xray comes with a stack of modules that open and close (see here) and each module contains specific information about the song, such as its lyrics, how many times it is mentioned on Twitter, in blogs, how many times it is traded on peer to peer networks, what it’s market potential is, what kind of license under which the song is available, what other songs it sounds like, among much other information. In addition to providing all of this information to the song owner (and anyone else they want to share it with), having so much information on each song allows us to provide a free filtering engine to the entire song buying music industry.

Imagine you’re an advertising executive and you want to license a song for your next ad campaign. You want something that sounds like “Brown Sugar” by Rolling Stones, which has 130 beats per minute, has the words “Russian roulette” in the lyrics, that has at least a 50% chance of becoming successful in a particular market, that already has a growing number of fans and an available license. The filtering system at Music Xray will soon provide that level of detail and that level of filtering ability. It will be a revolution in how that part of the business operates.

The important thing for artists is to have their music in databases of this sort. The one at Music Xray is particularly attractive because it will be open to anyone in the industry who wants to leverage Music Xray’s search capabilities. For a song owner, having their song in the Music Xray database will make it discoverable by anyone and reduces the work artists must do to promote their music within the industry once they’ve recorded it. It also reduces the work that music supervisors have to do when filtering hundreds of songs for each opportunity.

How will music consumption work?

From the music fan’s perspective, music recommendation engines will become a ubiquitous part of our lives, and not just for music and entertainment products but for many consumer goods and services. You’ve seen the ads for Angie’s List which compiles and features customer reviews of household and professional services. Amazon has been recommending books and other products for years based on what others with consumption habits similar to yours have purchased. This is just the beginning of where recommendations and “relevancy filtering” is going.

The best recommendation systems will be very sophisticated. They will expose you to enough of the “familiar” for you to feel like the system “gets” you and understands your tastes. They will expose you to enough of the “new” for you to feel like you are growing and evolving in your own unique direction. They will also keep you sufficiently in tune with your peers and with those who are like you for you to feel like you belong to a larger collective. They will know the difference between you at age 25 and you at age 45 and they will know which products you buy for yourself and which you purchase as gifts for others — an important distinction for companies when making future recommendations.

There are a number of problems for the music industry to sort out but things are taking shape. One thing for certain is that the fans will not suffer. There is now and there will continue to be more music available than ever before and it will become easier to find and enjoy. It will cost less and more artists will earn a living making it.

On May 9, 2008 Platinum Blue’s Music Xray™ was a central part of the story line on the CBS television series Numb3rs. As we’ve seen before in the NBC series Studio 60: On The Sunset Strip, Platinum Blue makes for good and interesting drama. Music Xray is not always portrayed accurately but that’s part of the dramatization.

In this episode of Numb3rs (called “Pay To Play”), a music label president is paying radio stations to play songs from one of the artists signed to his label in spite of the fact the public isn’t buying while on the other hand he refuses to sign an artist whose Music Xray™ scores are very high. The label owner is even paying the radio stations not to play his songs. It results in murder and intrigue.

Thankfully, in this case fiction is stranger than truth. Click on the video below to see some scenes from the show.