Panel Report:
Marketing Live Music On The Internet
Moderator
Marc Geiger William Morris Agency
Jack Isquith AOL Music LIVE!
Dave Jaworski PassAlong Networks
Steve Rennie REN Management
Kerry Trainor Yahoo! Music
Larry Weintraub Fanscape

The future of marketing live music on the Internet might be going the way the Net in general is going - very specialized and very targeted, which might make it that much harder to keep up with. But that doesn't mean the big boys and gatekeepers won't be necessary and successful.

Fanscape CEO Larry Weintraub put it best, saying that while MySpace and YouTube are the destinations now, things are quickly becoming more focused.

"In my world, if I'm hired by a record company, by a band, a tour, a promoter or a big product, I say to them, `We're going to have to look at about 10 to 15 to 50 communities, and we're not going to go for big numbers, we're going for targeted, and we're going to try to win over each of those segments," he said.

Even though the trend might be toward user-generated content, there is still the need for a starting point where new music can be introduced with high-powered, high-tech backup. This is where companies like Yahoo and AOL Music come in.

"The role that we play as Yahoo Music is most often that of a broadcast network, so we're kind of at the top of the funnel of exposing people to music and ultimately driving that through to sale and awareness of bands, tickets and potentially live music," said Kerry Trainor, head of original content for Yahoo Music.

He mentioned Yahoo's Nissan Live Sets, where bands film a live performance in front of a studio audience.

He brought up a very successful Nissan Live Set with Incubus that coincided with its record release, helping lead to a No. 1 record.

He said this method could easily be used to help tee up concert tours. The content his company creates generates 4 million to 8 million views per month, easily rivaling cable and network TV programming, Trainor said.

AOL Music Live's Jack Isquith said the way his company views its success is probably similar to Yahoo - with page views.

"It's not just about how much video do people consume, but how much other stuff' do they interact with," Isquith said.

He said things used to be done in a "less is more" fashion but, for some, more is more because you can sell more to a very targeted, passionate niche group.

"If you ask anyone who works at AOL Music, the whole idea is 'Let's just have them start here,'" Isquith said.

"If there's great stuff on Yahoo, we'll play it on our pages. We're pointing people to things that Kerry, our main competitor, is creating."

Moderator Marc Geiger jokingly remarked how that's much cheaper than creating original content and hosting it.

Another hot topic of discussion was user-generated content, which has exploded with the creation of sites like YouTube and MySpace.

Steve Rennie of REN Management, who manages Incubus, said William Morris Agency's Geiger gave him the idea to shoot his band's music video in front of a green screen and hold a contest where fans could fill in the background. It was a huge success, he said.

"My memory's fading, so we left and Geiger called me back 10 minutes later and said, `Did you write that down?' and I did, so we took the idea to the band. I told them it was Geiger's idea just in case they hated it. And they loved it... Some of the videos that came out of this would blow your mind."

Dave Jaworski's PassAlong Networks powers stores like eBay and the Sam Goody online store. The company's On Tour service looks at music on a user's hard drive and lets people know when their favorite artists are coming to town.

"This will be the year you see more than a million stores launched because you will see people able to have their own store," Jaworski said.

He said the On Tour service is his No. 1 marketing success story so far.

"On September 1st, it became the No. 1 downloaded widget on Apple.com, in any category," he said, joking that it beat out the Chia Pet widget, which is no small feat. "It [On Tour, not the Chia Pet] is a very powerful way for fans to connect with artists they love."

After poking fun at Yahoo Music's David Goldberg, who didn't attend the panel as scheduled, by having Ticket-master's David Goldberg take his seat on the dais, Geiger said he hopes the word "record" will be stricken from the record. He predicted the CD will "drop off a cliff" next year.

"They're not going to be zero, but it will almost be the equivalent of what happened two years ago when Fuji and Kodak announced they were no longer making paper and film," Geiger said.

In a one-word Q&A session started by Geiger, Isquith predicted for 2007 the rise of "stuff," which sparked laughter. But he wasn't trying to be cute. When taking into consideration that each facet of the music business - touring, merchandise, ringtones, etc. - is rising except CD sales, his "stuff" idea might not be so funny. Also predicted for next year were DRM-free MP3 and free MP3 altogether.

Fanscape's Weintraub believes that if you can connect the artist with the fan, the fan will do things for the artist. It's a simple concept, but no one was doing it when his company started compiling e-mail lists nine years ago. He worked with Kevin Lyman's Warped Tour and told him to treat it as an artist and make it a yearlong punk rock destination.

He said the biggest problem at the Warped Tour is the confusion of not knowing when a band is playing, so they let fans sign up for mobile alerts. About 90,000 people signed up.

Jaworski summed up where things are going in one word: Relationships.

"It's about offering a connection to that fan, really connecting artist and fan and giving them what they want, communicating with them well," Jawoski said.

"Good technology gets out of the way so that you can have a better relationship between the artist and fan. Do that well, and the average of 1.2 concerts per concertgoer in America goes up to 2.4, and everyone in this room is happy."

"I think there's something to this artist-fan thing," Geiger replied.

Ryan Borba