Paul Lamere at Music Machinery:
One of the ways that Music 2.0 has changed how we think about music is that there is so much interesting data available about how people are listening to music. Sites like Last.fm automatically track all sorts of interesting data that just was not available before. Forty years ago, a music label like Capitol would know how many copies the album Abbey Road sold in the U.S., but the label wouldn’t know how many times people actually listened to the album. Today, however, our iPods and desktop music players keep careful track of how many times we play each song, album and artist – giving us a whole new way to look at artist popularity.
It’s not just sales figures anymore, its how often are people actually listening to an artist. If you go to Last.fm you can see that The Beatles have over 1.75 million listeners and 168 million plays. It makes it easy for us to see how popular the Beatles are compared to another band (the monkees, for instance have 2.5m plays and 285K listeners).
With all of this new data available, there are some new ways we can look at artists. Instead of just looking at artists in terms of popularity and sales rank, I think it is interesting to see which artists generate the most passionate listeners. These are artists that dominate the playlists of their fans. I think this ‘passion index’ may be an interesting metric to use to help people explore for and discovery music. Artists that attract passionate fans may be longer lived and worth a listeners investment in time and money.
He proposes incorporating the passion index into a recommender filter. Make Genius Playlists smarter still. I’m guessing it will happen.
But more, in this week following the $1.92 million jury award in the retrial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset for the illegal downloading of 24 songs (see here, here, here and here), I’m remembering how the big media companies fought the VCR. Then, in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Jack Valenti famously said:
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
Having lost that fight they went on to make the lion’s share of their profits from video rentals. You might think they’d learned the lesson that innovation can lead to profits. They have not. Instead those same large media companies choose again now to stifle innovation in an attempt to protect old profits.
Someone’s going to find the way to make money from all of this innovation. Certainly there are ways to monetize the benefits of this new era. It’s not looking like the big media companies will be the ones to find it.