Sallie Ford and The Sound Outside are a great band. They have released two excellent full-length albums – their second, Untamed Beast, arrived just last month. They have solid music videos for their tracks Party Kids and I Swear (amongst others). They have played on The Late Show with David Letterman. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely you had heard of them before now.
Technologies like Pro Tools and Bandcamp have democratized the production and distribution of music as never before. Unfortunately, many artists – even those as widely appealing as Sallie Ford and The Sound Outside – don’t reach large fanbases. Finding music online isn’t all that different from the way we used to do it before the dawn of the MP3. Here’s why, and how you can start to fix it.
Everything we have now is broken
Despite significant advancements in digital distribution, none of today’s major platforms has solved the problem of music discovery.
Pandora and Spotify initially seem like good candidates. Spotify in particular, with the recent launches of its Follow and Discover features, appears to be turning resources towards the issue.
Unfortunately, each of these services has big problems. First, because these services make large content libraries available for a subscription fee, they discourage listeners from investing in individual albums, and neither pays musicians much for the privilege of hosting their content.
Neither Amazon nor Apple will solve music discovery because they don’t have any skin in the game.
iTunes still packs its Genius feature, and Amazon has its own incredible product recommendation engine, but neither service really has the financial incentive to improve music discovery. Apple makes a substantial profit selling music, but its earnings from iTunes are dwarfed by those for hardware sales. As long as iTunes keeps driving iPhone and iPad sales, Apple doesn’t really care if everyone buys the same Pitbull album.
Amazon has been known to sell some of its highest-profile releases at a loss, which could indicate that Amazon’s view on digital music serves the same purpose as it does for Apple: Get customers in the door to buy something else. Sales are terrific, but the service is mostly used as advertising for higher-margin sales. Neither Amazon nor Apple will solve music discovery because they don’t have any skin in the game.
With hordes of independent artists and a neat Discoverinator feature, Bandcamp is commendable for its efforts in support of indie music. Unfortunately, Bandcamp’s userbase is dwarfed by those of the other services (at least if profits are any indication). Serving more than 50 million downloads is a praiseworthy accomplishment, but Bandcamp lacks the size, in terms of both users and musicians, to give informed recommendations.
MOG produces many of its suggestions based on data pulled from Facebook. But how much similarity is there between the artists you “like” on Facebook and those you listen to on a daily basis? If you are at all similar to me, you are far more liberal with Facebook “likes” than you are with your listening time. Additionally, promoting artists already “liked” may not help one discover anything new, as you have already interacted with those artists in the past. This makes any discovery system based on this particular indicator necessarily flawed.
Imagining a better discovery service
The failures of existing services may indicate the path forward for a better discovery solution, which would have several different qualities to improve upon them:
Independent and exhaustive – To make the best recommendations, the service needs a full picture of someone’s listening habits. That requires learning what you listening to no matter where you listen, which means it can’t be a proprietary technology. Instead, it would have to vacuum up data from around the Web through a series of APIs. The discovery service will have to offer the distribution services major value in order to get access to their data.
Valid – The discovery model must be based actual listening habits instead of on other indicators (i.e., preferences expressed via social media).
Incentivized – Discovering music must be a part of the discovery service’s bottom line. If the service isn’t rewarded for the discoveries it provides users, then it has no motivation to connect its users to novel content. iTunes doesn’t care if you’re purchasing a record from Justin Bieber or Sallie Ford and The Sound Outside, and, thus, will never care enough about music discovery.
Rewarding – There must be incentives for the listener as well. If tastemakers were rewarded for their recommendations, they might offer them more freely, helping us all connect to new and better content.
Personal – Users should be able to actively participate in this process — or, not. That means radio-type listening (less active), playlist-type listening (highly active), and everything in between. It should take advantage of input like ratings, skipped songs, or a simple thumbs up or thumbs down.
Do it yourself
Despite the lack of a solid automated discovery solution, there are many behaviors you can adopt to begin discovering more music right now. Here are a few suggestions.
Consult local media – The alt weeklies for your nearest city can turn you on to great local bands you might otherwise miss. Similarly, there might be blogs or other media, like Portland’s excellent IntoTheWoods.tv, covering your local music scene. Seek them out and use them. Your local record store, especially its local music section, also should be considered a local medium for music discovery. Don’t overlook them; they could probably use your support.
Use non-local media – Pitchfork, Daytrotter, and all songs considered are all excellent prompts for new music. They’re merely a few of the blogs, podcasts, and media sites covering national level music. Find a few sites or writers you like and check back on them for recommendations. And, don’t forget The Promo Bay. Pirates have pretty good taste, it turns out.
Go to shows – Local media often promote upcoming events. If a band sounds cool, take a chance on seeing them live. Be sure to check out any opening acts as well, as they will often be smaller, possibly local bands.
Learn the ecosystem – Who is touring with whom? What bands share labels? Producers? A number of facets of the music economy can suggest new content you will like. The more you know, the more the potential for discovery.
Find tastemakers – These could be close personal friends or famous rock stars. Social media can connect you to people whose taste you trust, and this connection can inform you as to what those people are listening to. Tune in to find out.
Evangelize – Find something you like? Share it! Others may follow with suggestions in reply or with similar posts of their own.
Conclusion
Right now, music discovery largely comes down to your willingness to exert the effort necessary to find new good things. As I’ve outlined, no one is going to do this for you. However, if you do it yourself, you will be rewarded. Sallie Ford and The Sound Outside prove that.
Good luck, and good discovery!
I liked your approach to defining the problem. Especially the ‘skin in the game’ observation. The deliverables–what to do about discovering more music–were somewhat anticlimactic, although I could not have done any better. I’m curious as to how better aggregation of listener preferences can really model or predict what a listener might like. In navigating the ocean of music during my life, it has been the totally outside, fringe suggestions by key filter-people that have defined my tastes. I’ll never forget the suggested albums (not necessarily from trusted sources) that I HATED upon first exposure that went on to define great periods of musical and cultural exploration and growth. I’m not sure my listening preferences would have ever pointed me in those directions.
if we could have pandora in europe that would already be a step forward
Not sure about other users, but I have discovered quite a few new songs and artists on Spotify. You discover more when you’re searching for an artist and randomly notice similar artists. This often helps me to remember to add an artist I tend to forget about, or discover a new.
The radio plays a role, but it’s a VERY small role. Though I will admit, many users skip songs/artists they don’t know unless it has a catchy or catching intro.
The other issue is the “back” feature on its radio is disabled, so if you notice a song has a catchy ending but you’re too slow to rewind, you have to stop the radio to re-play the previous song.
Discovery is sadly near death.
At Musicfellas.com we are trying to solve this exact problem using a pro-artist approach. The problem of discovering new and good music is especially acute for independent music. We have just started out and have seen people discovering new music via our curated mixtapes as well as feeds of people they follow.
It’s easy to find new music on RageTracks.com
I’d never thought about it until now, but the online services I use for music discovery – last.fm, blip.fm, 8tracks.com, SoundCloud – are different than the ones I use to purchase music – iTunes, Bandcamp, Amazon. Of course, they should be the same…
I don’t connect from one to the other, not even through any convenient, “click here to purchase now on iTunes” buttons.
I’m the same way. I actually use Pandora for music discovery, and then purchase the album from Amazon. If I know what I want to specifically listen to, then I use Spotify. It seems way too fragmented to me.
So, ideally what you guys would want is something which has a complete catalogue and enhances discovery and gives you easy options to buy?
Pandora is my music discovery, Spotify is where I can listen to that artists full album, and Amazon is where I can buy the music.
Well, Amazon and iTunes fit those credentials, but they don’t cut it for music discovery. When I think about, the issue with iTunes and Amazon is that I don’t know the people making the recommendations from Adam.
Yes, being pro-active about music discovery is the payment consumers have to put up with in return for immediate access to just about all the music that’s ever been recorded, both from legal and illegal sources. Yet so far relatively few music consumers seem prepared to do this, hardly surprising either- if anything, consumers now put less effort- and money- into appreciating recordings than they ever have done. How many invest in a decent hi- fi ? Or pay more for CDs – or even mp3s- rather than a sonically compromised but free file from a pirate ? Even those willing to pay are more likely to accept a lower level of fidelity from Spotify than a CD from the artist’s own site.
So while all the above are good and useful points, they pre-suppose a level of engagement from consumers that is probably pretty rare. Even as the range of music available rises exponentially, the chances of Sallie E&T all’s chances of making some kind of living out of it also reduces.
I’d add a further recommendation. When you do find something you like, and it’s clear the artist in question is pretty obscure, so far- buy a CD, preferably direct from the artist. That way the chances- in the short term- of the artist making the decision to carry on, in an increasingly difficult industry, remain as high as possible. A little known artist makes almost no money from Spotify- literally a few dollars a year, at best. That $5 profit you offer from just one CD sale probably matches it. And that can make all the difference, right now, this year, if there are enough of them….
The old business model in the music industry “filter” a lot of artist. Bands and Singers would be record deals and radio air play. Sure there was live venue where new music could be found. Why is it so hard today to find new music? Because it is easier to produce and distribute music there is too much music out there. Today the music business is so different than the past because there is no filter.
I agree that independence is very important as I can’t really envision a day where people exclusively listen to music in only one place. However, couldn’t you argue that last.fm brings together various services with scrobbling? Obviously it’s not exhaustive, but if you like algorithmic recommendations it’s not bad.
When it comes to receiving recommendations from people based on their listening habits, like Spotify’s new Follow feature does, the results really can be mixed. I think this is probably down to the fact that what you listen to is not necessarily a recommendation. How do you know that they even like the song? Listening is only the first filter on the way to a recommendation.
If you’re interested in discovering new music, you might be interested in hearing about the approach we have taken at Let’s Loop – LetsLoop.com. We help people discover music by letting them follow friends or other music fans who make explicit recommendations. As this is not something that they are just listening to, but something they have gone out of their way to recommend it is extremely powerful. It also has the benefit of independence as you just share the song or album, it is not tied to any listening service. We then use a bunch of APIs to let you listen with the service of your choice: YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Vimeo, with Rdio and Deezer coming very soon. We believe that this focus on active recommendations, that are not tied to any one listening service, from people you know and trust is extremely powerful. We also have a bunch of other cool stuff using APIs to aid discovery, including events from Songkick. If this sounds interesting, please check it out. And if you want to say hi or see what music I’m into you can find me here: LetsLoop.com/Rick. Cheers
To fix the difficulty of finding new music, you need consumers who WANT to find new music. Music discovery is a problem for the artists, not for most of the consumers out there.
There is a small core of music lovers (many already musicians themselves), who are interested in exploring and actively engaging music; but by and large your average music listener just likes to have something blaring in the background while they’re doing other things. Are these people ever likely to need lots of new music when they’re barely listening to what they do have? Do you think these people really care one iota about music discovery?
What is really needed is people who care about MUSIC. And honestly, I have no idea what it would take to make that happen.