Congratulations to the iLike Team! Yesterday they launched into beta...iLike.com. As you might expect from my gushing about the team up there in Seattle, they've exceeded even my wild dream for how something like this could work. Sometime when I'm not so busy, I'll try to biograph the ideas involved, but right now I've got a radio show to premiere.For now, you'll just hafta be content with being able to see my music tastes at a glace (see the new iLike widget in the right hand column). Besides, it's the iLike Team's day, go read thier blog.

Why is Spiral Frog a neat development but ultimately irrelevant? Because it misses the point...or rather three points:

1. Apple sells music so they can sell iPods - iTMS is a service that makes the iPod, nearly everyone's favorite mp3 player, that much nicer and oh btw it locks you into the Apple ecosystem (note: I'm note sure what the stas are, but I can't believe that any more than 5% of music on iPods are from the iTMS). Spiral Frog's service does not provide any listening experience on the iPod nor provides a comparable listening experience on any other platform. To put it another way: it's just not nearly as stylish, addictive, or fun as donning white earbuds, endlessly running your finger around a wheel, or falling into click and skip bliss.
2. Discovering music is a contextual experience - I read somewhere that Spiral Frog may not plan to compete directly with the iTunes music store, but instead think of themselves and providing full song previews in exchange for ads. Huh? On the one hand, this explains why the DRM (6 month expiration without coming back for ads) is so onerous...at least Apple's FairPlay scheme gives the perception of owning the music. On the other hand who is the market for this kind of service? Most people are quite happy with 30 second clips and psychological experiments indicate that we form attachments to songs/recordings in much less time. More importantly (and this may only appear so for lack of detail in the press), the "full length previews" are found actively not passively and without context. By contrast, you could see Yahoo Launch as a "full length preview" service (i.e. radio) that is passive with personalized context.
   
3. Costs come in many different currencies - How can you possible say that listening to a single 90 second ad is "free"? Sure I don't pay any money for it, but listening to 90 seconds of anything is a serious cost. Radio ads are only 15 to 30 seconds long for a reason. We don't even make GarageBand reviewers listen to more than 90 seconds of a song they don't like before allowing them to rate it down. And this isn't 90 seconds every once in a while (on Clearchannel radio you get 4 songs for every 90 seconds of ads). this is 90 seconds of ads for every song. Granted it's only the first time you listen to it, but can you imagine what an enormous brake on usage that will be? Click. 90 sec ad. 30 sec download. Listen. That's so far away from a recipe for rinse and repeat, I can't even begin to even consider the finer points of why this is a bad user experience. And forget about capturing the long tail (unobtrusive AdWords these are not).

So my advice to the Spiral Frog team (which seems to have pretty sharp people and therefore, I wouldn't count them out just because of one burst of, probably erroneous, press).

1. Integrate with a single music player and get a cut of the hardware sales.
2. Recreate the personalized radio experience of Yahoo Launch on a that player
3. "Sell" the music in bundles such that I can listen to multiple songs in a row before being interrupted by ads (and try to lower your "price" point to something more in line with radio while you are at it)

At the very least this will give them a chance at capturing the market Satellite Radio has (small but at least a market that has real people that fall into it) and potentially a shot at creating a truly novel form of distribution.

And we're off! The new iLike project (was code named iJam) just got funded. I probably won't say much more about it here until it launches but you can follow the progress at the team blog. Suffice to say, I'm very excited to see where these guys (some of the best ajax coders in the world!) go with my little sketch on how to discover music (or frankly anything) socially.

Kudos to GarageBand.com Advisory Board Chair, Sir George Martin, for being open enough to new technology and self effacing enough to completely rework some of his earlier Beatles masterworks for Cirque du Soliel's new show, Love. Eighty years old and still on the verge...

In other Beatles tidbits:

Did you know that the Beatles are the single most cited influence among GarageBand members?

Have you left a 64th birthday wish for Paul, yet? (be sure to check out Woodstock Taylor's singing telegram based on When I'm Sixty Four and the 2-year old singing Hey Jude)

God bless our new engineering team hired and headed by legendary MicroSoft manager Hadi Partovi (yes Ali's brother). Also keeping it the family is our new CTO, Nat Brown, one of the best architects in the world.

In addition to working on our new social music discovery offering they've found time to make the old battleship better. Check out the new look of GarageBand.com's homepage at (if you are logged in and end up on you MyGarage Page, just click on the masthead logo to go to the homepage) and a new page featuring our sucessful bands.

It looks great, and new, maybe even Web 2.0 without succumbing to the lure of rounded corners

And yes, we are hiring please visit our code name for the project, iJam, for more info

We may be the Johnny-come-latelys to the free hosting thing, but I'd like to say it was worth the wait:

* 200MB: that's 25-50 songs and not limited to just songs, podcast posts, images, whatever media you can provide all goes under the same cap (by comparison: Pure Voulme and MySapce are limited to 3 mp3s)
* Automatic creation of embeddable podcast from your media, so you can embed it anywhere (your band page, your MySpace page) You can manage all your media in one place and it will propagate through the whole web (as opposed to being forced to upload to every site and split your fan traffic among them)
* Tags, filtering, the contest: no where else can you earn a guaranteed 20 listens for your song and maybe more based on how people like it. Your song gets tagged and made available to people who indicate a taste for your style.

A nice offering right? And just at the right time, too. The gov't is trying to rip yet another new one for the internet radio community, by forcing them to use DRM on any streams (streams for goodness sakes!) that include tracks under the DMCA statutory license. The GarageBand artist community sidesteps the DMCA and makes it possible to stream amp3s from their accounts without royalties. Now we'll let them make available more (if not all) of their catalog for free streaming. If this law goes through, then artists who play nice with streaming will have even more of a promotional advantage in new media.

Vive la France. While I'm usually not a big fan of government intervetntion in the economy, especially the new kind, I do respect governments that step in on the side of consumer liberty.

First to clarify, I disagree with the implication of this article that this law would have any significant long-term impact on Apple's position:

1. In Europe there is far more music activity on phones than on dedicated mp3 players. In fact it is worth noting that ringtones worldwide dwarf download sales by a magnitude.
2. DRMed downloads represent a very small fraction of the activity on even iPods them selves. Unprotected mp3s are the primary currency of the iPod generation...well, and "friends", what ever they are ;)

So who does care about this? The traditional record label. Remember that there were mp3 players before DRM and the iTunes Music Store was developed specifically to make the record labels happy (and make Apple look good).

That's not to say Apple is a saint either. They make a huge margin on the iPod (much bigger than on download sales). Why? because of their vaunted "design" or "marketing" or "status". Perhaps, but I think a much under counted source of the economic value of the product lies in the knowledge that you can fill it up with unprotected mp3s.

In the worst case, the artist does not get paid for this consumption (i.e. pirated or P2P or "borrowed"). In the best case, the mp3s are *freed* from their plastic cage (the CD). In the worst, case no new economic value is being created. In the second Apple (well not really Apple, but that is a different story) has done a huge service of breaking down a level of inefficiency in the music industry.

Either way the whole digital music economy depends on content being created and artists being compensated sufficiently to motivate them. That, of course is not something this French law addresses (and frankly no law really could). So it's back to us, the people building companies in this space to always keep in mind that everything we do should motivate the creation of new music (or at least not kill that motivation).

our new desktop application was BETA released today

http://www.gpal.com

Here's some early thoughts from a Cnet reporter

http://news.com.com/2061-12351_3-6036099.html

This product incorporates many of the ideas I've been discussing on this blog, spcifically many of the enhancements I wished other companies would make to thier products to facilitate the paradigm shift we forsee. We got tired of waiting and just built it our selves.

More later...

Today we launched Gcast.com, a free service that makes it easy for any person to create, host, and share their own podcast. During our beta period, thousands of real people have already made a diversity of creations:
- Kingsley's Corner - a UK commercial radio DJ, finally free to create the show he always wanted
- Poopcast - a certain proud parent recording audio snapshots by phone
- Anne Heaton - a touring singer-songwriter leaving voice messages from the road
- Guess Who's Coming - questions answered by a sex-advice author

....and, as of today:
- ONE Campaign - Bono, Nelson Mandela, Chris Martin of Coldplay, & more asking you to join the fight against AIDS and poverty. Today is World AIDS Day, and we chose to launch today in partnership with an organization commited to eradicating AIDS and poverty in our lifetime.

Visit the podcasters' websites to listen. Read the full press releases below.

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MEDIA ADVISORY Contact: Meighan Stone, ONE Campaign
November 29, 2005 Phone: (202) 464-1345


ONE CAMPAIGN JOINS WITH GCAST TO USE PODCAST TECHNOLOGY
TO HELP FIGHT GLOBAL AIDS AND EXTREME POVERTY

First ONE.ORG Podcast with Bono of U2 and President Nelson Mandela
to launch on World AIDS Day

WASHINGTON, DC-- On December 1st, ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History will join with Gcast.com to launch the first ONE.ORG podcast. The World AIDS Day podcast will feature Bono, U2 lead singer and co-founder of DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade for Africa), former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela and Chris Martin of Coldplay, along with Christian music artists and other ONE supporters.
A podcast is an audio recording, from a 10-sec sound to a 30-min radio show, stored as an MP3 file that is easily downloadable through the internet. In addition to being provided to the 2 million current ONE supporters, the podcast will also be available for free on the one.org website.
Every day in Africa, HIV/AIDS kills 6,300 people, 8,500 people are infected with the HIV virus and 1,400 newborn babies are infected during childbirth. New web technologies such as podcasting can help Americans raise their voices as ONE against the emergency of AIDS and extreme poverty, joining together to ask leaders to do more to save millions of lives in the poorest countries.

WHAT: World AIDS Day ONE Campaign podcast

WHO: Bono, U2 lead singer and co-founder of DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade for Africa)
Former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela
Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay
Christian music artists and other ONE supporters

WHEN: 12:01am, World AIDS Day, December 1, 2005

WHERE: www.ONE.org

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Media Contact:
Brooke Hammerling
212-677-4835
brooke@brewpr.com




GCAST BRINGS PODCAST CREATION TO THE MASSES

World’s First Turnkey Service for Consumers to Create and Publish Their Own Podcasts



SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER 30, 2005 – Gcast (http://www.Gcast.com), a groundbreaking new service that breaks the podcasting process down into a few easy-to-follow steps, was officially unveiled today. Gcast, a sister service to GarageBand.com, enables anyone to create, publish, and share their own podcast, all for free.

Podcasting lets people get their voices heard, whether they’re recording an audio journal for friends and family, or sharing a playlist of their favorite new music. Thanks to Gcast, podcasts can now be made by anyone for anyone.

Gcast offers unlimited free hosting to all podcasters, as well as integrated access to the world’s leading podsafe music catalog. Gcast also enables anybody to record updates to their podcast via telephone calls, making podcasting even easier than sending email.

“Our original vision with GarageBand.com has always been to democratize the music industry by empowering musicians,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of GarageBand.com and Gcast. “However, our broader vision with Gcast is to democratize the broader media industry. By embracing user-generated content of all kinds, we are making personal broadcasting a reality.”

-more-

While there are other early services for podcasters, Gcast is the only solution that offers free hosting as well as easy access to the world’s largest library of podsafe music. Full Gcast features include:

• Free Hosting – Gcast offers free hosting to anybody who creates a podcast, currently with no limits on media storage. Gcast hopes to support this service with advertising, and will offer ad-free paid options in the future.

• Online Playlist Manger that auto-generates your podcast -- Gcast lets users point and click to organize and mix audio from a range of sources -- whether a phone recording, a GarageBand.com song, or an MP3 from their computer. Once a playlist is ready to be published, Gcast mixes the audio into one continuous MP3 file and transparently generates the RSS feed for the podcast.

• Podcasting by phone – Gcast introduces the easiest way to record a podcast. Podcasters can call 1-888-65-GCAST, enter a numeric ID and PIN code, and start recording, just like leaving a voicemail. Recordings can be published immediately from the phone, or can be saved to their Gcast account to be published later.

• Integrated access to the world’s leading podsafe music catalog, GarageBand.com. For podcasters that wish to include music in their podcast, Gcast eliminates one of the primary obstacles -- securing the necessary licenses from the copyright holders. Gcast is integrated with GarageBand.com, the leading provider of music for podcasting, so that podcasters can add music to their playlists with just one click.

• Ability to embed podcasts into any Web page for easy playback -- The Gcast player can be embedded into any web page or blog, giving instant listening gratification to anybody with a web browser. Fans can also check out past episodes and subscribe to receive future episodes automatically.

"By enabling anybody to get their voice heard, Gcast opens a vast new frontier for personal broadcasting," said Bob Kingsley, a former UK-based radio DJ whose podcast, Kingsley's Corner, is now available at http://www.bobkingsley.co.uk/ and major podcast directories. "I dropped out of commercial radio some years ago because I was increasingly frustrated by the creative restrictions that seemed to accompany it. All I ever really wanted to do was to play my personal choice of good music, have a chat about it, and give it the respect it deserves. Thanks to the Internet, GarageBand.com, and Gcast, I can do exactly that, freed from those old creative restrictions."

Happy Birthday GarageBand! Today is the six year anniversary of the garageband.com domain. Not bad for a career in music, huh!? Anyway, here's a little blast from the past for all you long time fans...a screenshot of an early homepage.



and a copy of the press release. What's perhaps most remarkable is that, except for the $250K contracts, all the ideas laid out in this press release have come to fruition.

September 30, 1999

RECORD PRODUCER JERRY HARRISON (Talking Heads) JOINS FORCES WITH TECHNOLOGY PIONEER AND FORMER NETSCAPE EXECUTIVE TO LAUNCH GARAGEBAND.COM

Garageband.com Empowers Music-Makers, Enthusiasts To Identify Best Of The Emerging Bands; Hottest Bands To Be Offered $250,000 Recording Contracts And Will Be Produced By Proven Music Industry Pros.

San Francisco, C.A. -- Sept.30, 1999 -- garageband.com, the only Internet site created by musicians for musicians and dedicated music fans, was officially launched today. Its goal is to identify, cultivate and sign the best of the emerging bands, especially those that too often fall beneath the radar screen because they are in towns and cities that are not media centers. Top bands will receive $250,000 recording contracts and will be matched with proven producers and other music industry professionals.

The announcement was made jointly by garageband's three co-founders: Jerry Harrison, record producer and former member of the rock band, Talking Heads; Tom Zito, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and Dr. Amanda Lathroum Welsh, former head of research for Netcenter, a division of Netscape Communications and designer of garageband's proprietary LCE rating and review method which determines which bands will be signed.

Unlike other music websites which concentrate on the distribution and delivery of music, garageband.com is focussing on the content side, that is identifying the best of the emerging musical talent based on the ratings and reviews of other musicians and avid music listeners. Said Tom Zito, Chairman and CEO of garageband.com, "For most new bands out there it's virtually impossible to get through the doors of the record companies and they can't afford to give their music away on the Internet. The best of them do have hit record potential and we want to uncover these talented groups and give them a genuine shot at the success that they deserve. Because it takes talent to recognize talent, we are placing the decision-making power with those most qualified to exercise it, the music-makers themselves."

Garageband.com is inviting aspiring musicians in rock/pop, alternative, urban/hip-hop, electronica/dance, R&B and other genres to upload their music onto the garageband.com site where it will be reviewed and rated by their music peers, using garageband.com's proprietary ratings engine. Bands can upload as many songs as they wish at no charge, but in order to do so, they must first review and rate at least two randomly selected and anonymously assigned tracks that have been submitted by other bands. Music lovers are also invited to be part of the intelligent process for determining which bands they want to be recorded. Bands that receive the best ratings then advance to round two for a "virtual battle of the bands."

Starting in November, and on a monthly basis beginning next year, top-rated bands will be awarded $250,000 recording contracts and be paired with top-tier record producers and other respected music industry professionals who have agreed to join garageband.com's Advisory Board. In order to expose every band's music to as many qualified reviewers as possible, garageband.com has designed a "Frequent Reviewer" Points program with rewards ranging from time in a world-class recording studio for bands, to VIP concert tickets for fans.

Great care has gone into designing a rating system that recognizes the quality of the music, not just the quantity of the votes, thereby eliminating the risk of "ballot box stuffing." Known as the LCE, (Lathroum Comparater Engine) this proprietary rating system was co-developed by Amanda Lathroum Welsh, Ph.D., co-founder and president of garageband.com, and three of her senior engineers. The LCE system is based on a range of measurement comparisons which are designed to eliminate the bias and lack of context that can skew other comparative rating methods.

Said Jerry Harrison, whose successful career as a musician and record producer spans some thirty years and who formed his first band as a teenager in his hometown of Milwaukee, "garageband.com is a groundbreaking concept in the music business because it offers every group an equal opportunity to be discovered -- not just those playing in the big cities.

"But garageband.com is also about creating an Internet community for musicians so that, from across the country and around the world, they can communicate with each other and with industry professionals to help them develop their music and their careers. For the music industry, we want garageband.com to be the premier A&R Internet site, both by identifying hot new artists to sign and promote and also by developing and nurturing those promising new bands that are not quite ready to head into the studio to cut their first album."

garageband.com has drawn together an Advisory Board for its virtual community comprising a broad range of respected music industry creatives and professionals. It currently includes Jim Dickinson (musician/producer), Dave Jerden (recording engineer), Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade (producers and mixers), Stephen Hague (producer/mixer), Ed Stasium (producer/engineer), Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley (producers), Nick Launay (producer), Tim Palmer (mixer/producer), Rick Nowels (songwriter/guitarist/producer), Dave Way (engineer/mixer), Mathew Wilder (composer/artist/producer) and Stephen Lironi (producer). Other names will be announced shortly.

I just wanted to expand a little on the quote from me in the San Antonio Express-News, "The most exciting thing about the promotion is that this great music is going to be exposed to such a wide range of people(emphasis mine)." I should have said, "the most exciting thing about the promotion is that this great music is going to be exposed to a wider audience".

Why is this so exciting? It's exciting because this is the first time that the programming decision of a major media outlet has been made by democratic means. For years now, "this great music" selected by the people for the people, has been kept in the walled garden of GarageBand.com. Now these exceptionally cultivated flowers have been unleashed on the fields of the world. It's exciting because "this great music" will lead people to learn the startling fact that "this great music" isn't backed by a record label but chosen by a huge community of music lovers that they can join. How do you think they are going to feel now that they can participate in the creation of culture? Paradigm shifted? Empowered? Reconnected? I think so.

And that's just a start. What do you think will happen when the people are able to determine what gets on the radio? More on that later...

My response to Mark Cuban's thoughts on Podcasting

Even though you may not guess it from the comments so far, Mark’s cautionary tale was meant for a specific audience: the individual podcaster. It's good wisdom from the blogsphere to the emerging podsphere (podcastersphere?, podwaves?, pod-people-invasion?), about the current state of affairs in long-tail digital media. And as such, he was careful to exclude extensions of other media into podcasting (radio shows, conferences, etc.) and the business of providing podcasting infrastructure. Restated in my words, he said, “podcast for the love of podcasting, not because you are hoping to make a buck off it.”

Still, equating streaming radio with podcasting is like equating Geocities with Blogger. On the surface they accomplish the same result. Deeper down the creation and consumption experiences differ in significant ways, many of which have already been noted in other comments. It was pretty clear from the start that streaming radio had limited capacity for change, because while it freed creators, it shackled consumers (to their computers) and adoption depended major technological developments taking place. Ultimately we're just not in the habit of embracing inconvenient media platforms, even when the content may be better (sorry Dan & Scott).

While it would be difficult to make a living off podcasting right now, it is too early to say that it could never be done. While streaming radio was hamstrung by limited technical adoption, podcasting has grown out of a consumption culture shift embodied in the iPod. Blogs, podcasts and RSS have changed how we *think* about digital media. In this sense, podcasting is more like cable TV. Sure, cable in the 80s offered more channels and greater freedom for creators - but c’mon, Springsteen told it straight, “57 channels (and nothing’s on).” Cable was adopted because it made watching the nightly news more convenient. Award-winning content like the Sopranos came much later.

All that said, the high quality of Kingsley’s Corner and the thousands of people listening to Coverville are nothing to snuff at. We should all hope a sustainable model emerges to support them.

Trent Renznor, the Grokster ruling, podcasting on iTunes - there is a lot that's happend recently that I should have written about, but alas there is a good reason I haven't. I've been planning my wedding :) Unfortunately I had limited time so I had to choose between accelerating the music paradigm shift and writing about it. I hope you think I made the right choice.

Don't worry though. The wedding is over and drought will end soon (not that I was the most prolific writer before). For now I invite you to check out my new podcast, created with (you guessed it) the GarageBand Podcast Studio.

Today we unveiled our take on a better way to fill the promotional gap in the music industry. It's been a long day, so I only have enough energy to post the press release right now.
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GarageBand PODCAST STUDIO IS UNVEILED AS First CONSUMER ONLINE Tool to Record, Mix and Publish Podcasts

American Idol’s Bo Bice is Featured on First Track Ever Released
by a Major Artist for Podcasting

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – May 23, 2005 – GarageBand.com, the leading independent music community, today announced “GarageBand Podcast Studio,” the world’s first Web-based tool to record, mix and publish a podcast. This new tool also offers consumers greater access to GarageBand.com’s 40,000 active podcasts, which represents the world’s largest catalog of podcast-ready music. In conjunction with this launch, long-time GarageBand.com member and American Idol finalist, Bo Bice, is featured on Papion, a new single now available through GarageBand.com and the first track ever released by a major artist expressly for podcasting.

“We’re on the forefront of a wave that will make personal broadcasting a reality and redefine how music is discovered and promoted,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of GarageBand.com. “With the GarageBand Podcast Studio, we’re proud to cement our lead in the podcasting space, making us not only the #1 provider of music for podcasts and the #1 hosting service for podcasters, but also the first complete solution for recording, mixing and publishing your own podcast.”

To make podcasting accessible to everyone, GarageBand Podcast Studio offers innovative features to encourage mass adoption. For artists, GarageBand Podcast Studio provides a simple way to license and distribute their music to podcasters. For podcasters, recording, mixing and publishing become as easy as pointing and clicking. For subscribers and listeners, GarageBand Podcast Studio provides easier ways to access podcasts for free, without an iPod or special software.

“Speaking for Bo and the rest of the band, we’re delighted to share our music with the world via the podcasting community and the GarageBand Podcast Studio,” said John Cooper, bassist for Bo Bice & Sugar Money. “We’re especially grateful to the podcasters who have already added Papion to their stations. Podcasting is a natural online promotion channel for any musician, and I expect to see more major artists embracing it in the future.”

World’s largest catalog of podcast-ready music
Thanks to its award-winning charts and unique collaborative-filtering system, GarageBand.com is widely recognized as the number one source of music for podcasting. With thousands of bands posting new music every day, GarageBand.com hosts the world’s largest catalog of podcast-ready music, now enhanced with “one-click publishing” to add a track to your own podcast. This catalog includes Papion, the exclusive track written and composed by American Idol Bo Bice and his hometown band, Sugar Money. This new single is already one of GarageBand.com’s most popular tracks, airing on podcasts and webcasts across the Internet. Within weeks of release, it reached number three on the Live365 Internet Radio Network’s “Top Sideloads” chart. Other top artists in the GarageBand.com catalog include Jenna Drey, currently number 23 on the Billboard Radio Airplay chart, and Geoff Byrd, who was recently recognized by Live365 and Radiowave as Internet Radio’s Most Successful Unsigned Artist of the Year.

Record, Mix and Publish
The new GarageBand Podcast Studio is a simple but powerful tool that enables anybody to create a podcast. Users can upload their own recordings and mix them with music from the GarageBand.com catalog using a point-and-click Playlist Manager. Once a new playlist is published, it is immediately available to listeners for streaming, download and subscription from GarageBand.com’s servers. Hosting is free and GarageBand.com intends to support the creativity of podcasters with advertising, as well as offer premium ad-free options in the future.

Phone-casting
As a result of an innovative new service developed with Tellme Networks, the GarageBand Podcast Studio will soon feature a convenient option to record by phone. Podcasters can save their telephone recording for mixing later, or immediately publish their podcast by phone – without ever touching a computer! Recently-signed Geoff Byrd, GarageBand.com’s top-rated artist of all time, intends to use this system to run a podcast-by-phone from his nationwide radio tour.

More accessible to listeners
GarageBand.com is bringing podcasting to the masses. While the penetration of iPods and special podcasting software continues to grow, GarageBand.com now allows listeners to subscribe to their favorite shows with more familiar options, including MyYahoo, MyMSN and even email.

Now playing: over 40,000 active podcasts
GarageBand.com's existing catalog of user-created playlists is now available in the form of thousands of podcasts that any listener can subscribe to for free. Similarly, every band on the site now has a free podcast, where listeners can receive new songs (and other audio messages), gig listings, and news posted by the band. GarageBand.com announced that 40,000 active podcasts are live today and more will be coming online in the near future. GarageBand.com also plans to issue additional podcasts of its own, such as a "track-of-the-day" feed for each musical genre.

###

About GarageBand.com (www.garageband.com)
GarageBand.com is the world’s largest community for podcasting and independent music. Since 1999, twenty-one of its highest-ranking bands have been signed, including double-platinum recording artists Drowning Pool. GarageBand.com’s top-rated artist of all time, Geoff Byrd, is rapidly becoming the first pop star born from the Internet. GarageBand.com uses collaborative filtering to let ordinary people identify and promote the best songs, generating the definitive charts of independent music. Widely recognized as the ideal filter for emerging music, GarageBand.com is the #1 provider of music for podcasting, with a growing network of radio partners in addition to the tens of thousands of people who host their own podcasts at GarageBand.com.

Recognized by Time Magazine as one of 2003’s “50 Best Websites,” GarageBand.com’s mission is to redefine how music is discovered and promoted. GarageBand.com is run by CEO Ali Partovi, whose previous startup, LinkExchange, was acquired for $265 million by Microsoft in 1998.


GarageBand is a registered trademark of GarageBand.com. The best of GarageBand.com music is available for sale on the iTunes Music Store, but GarageBand.com and the GarageBand Podcast Studio are not otherwise affiliated with Apple Computer or Apple’s GarageBand software product. For more information about the trademark agreement between GarageBand.com and Apple, visit: http://www.garageband.com/htdb/companyinfo/pr010704.html.

media Contact:

Brooke Hammerling
Zeno Group
415-596-5428
Brooke.Hammerling@zenogroup.com

GarageBand PODCAST STUDIO IS UNVEILED AS First CONSUMER ONLINE Tool to Record, Mix and Publish Podcasts

USA Today writes, "Dozens of lawyers and big names in the entertainment and technology industries crowded into the red-upholstered seats" to hear arguments on "MGM vs. Grokster" today. Actually, that sentence should read, "Dozens of lawyers and big names in the soon-to-be-former entertainment and technology industry". The case hinges on the interpretation and application of the precedent set in 1984's "Sony v. Universal Studios" decision. I contend that both entertainment copyright holders (but not entertainment creators) and file-sharing networks (but not sharing music) are on their way out. It's funny to watch them fight over who gets to exit first.

The entertainment companies claim that file sharing software (by encouraging piracy) violates their copyright. Music companies have felt this most acutely, but movie companies are stepping up to the plate before it inevitably becomes an issue for them, too. They claim that the networks allow people to make their content freely available, without their permission. Clearly they view file sharing as a threat to their business.

Ironically, the real long-term threat to entertainment companies isn't software that illegally makes content free to people, but people who make legally free content. In a study conducted at MIT, they found that scientists who published their findings freely on the Internet were 10 times more likely to be cited than scientists who insisted on preserving copyright and published in paper journals. I imagine that the court will consider statistics like the percentage of traffic used for trading music illegally. But the number of files we are talking about - the handful of "hits" that pay the record company bills - is a tiny fraction of the quality music in the world, and tiny compared even to free music available on GarageBand.com alone. Unlike Don Henley, Sheryl Crow and the Dixie Chicks, there are 140,000 artists gladly making their music available as unprotected, free mp3s. Granted, they have less to lose, but the point is that if someone offers a free option of comparable quality, you're gonna have a lot of pressure on the price of your product.

Despite their insistence to the contrary, file sharing software makers need the record labels to care about copyright and at least try to lock up the music. Why? Because ironically, the networks depend on the promotional investment record companies make to identify/create the hit songs that causethe bulk of their trading traffic. If record companies are unable to protect copyright, they will have less incentive to invest in and promote music. If the record companies stopped promoting music, the file sharing networks would devolve into an undifferentiated morass.

If MGM loses this cases, that doesn't mean we're talking about the day the music died. Record companies historically serve two purposes.

• allocating the scarce resources of studios, manufacturing, and distribution

and


• promoting and marketing music to a passive listening audience

New technology like Apple's GarageBand is making it easier and cheaper for anyone to create music...just for the fun of it (imagine that). And of course, file sharing is just a derivative of core technologies - mp3 and the Internet - that make it far easier and cheaper to distribute content. All-in-all there is actually more music being made today than ever before. The resources record companies used to muster are no longer scarce!

However, people's attention spans are still scarce. So if record companies can no longer afford to market and promote music, how are we going to sort through the embarrassment of music being created? New technologies like the GBRP, RSS 2.0 and iPodder are leading the way to a world where the collective activity of music lovers fills the promotional void. It's real peer-to-peer music sharing, community building, and culture creating.

I have left out something from this discussion...how does anyone make any money in this world? An interesting thing happens when you stop talking about scarcity and start talking about abundance: money doesn't seen to matter because everything is so intrinsically cheap. However, not everything is abundant in this emerging world, so capital still needs to be allocated and therefore money can be made. Recognizing the trend (however nascent it is), GarageBand.com is developing a business model for our members, but I'll save that discussion for another time - when it is no longer confidential ;)

Thanks to Napster To Go's superbowl media blast, the music business question of the moment is Owning vs. Renting music. This is a sadly misleading rhetorical structure. Neither party in this argument, iTunes nor Napster (and by proxy Microsoft's Janus platform), provides rentals or sells ownership of recordings in the traditional sense.

Ownership of music recordings, whether by design or accident, has traditionally supplied complete portability. What you could do with your copy of a recording was only limited by available technology and fair use laws. I could play my 45s on any record player. LPs could be copied to tape for use in the car. CDs can be (infamously) ripped to mp3s for use on any digital player. By contrast iTunes songs only work on iPods. I can't play the songs I purchased from them on my sports music player or my digital jukebox. The only paid service of note that offers real ownership is eMusic.

If Napster offered true rental access to music we would only pay for the time we listen to the song. Traditional rental models have to contend with a simple fact: If one person rents an item (book, apartment, video), then another person cannot rent that same item. This is why they keep multiple copies of popular items and they charge you for the time that you have possession of the item regardless of whether you were using it that whole time. Traditional rental business solve the problems of *scarcity*. In the case of digital music however, there are unlimited copies of a song available and so the only duration of economic consequence is when a song is actually being listened to. I would be generous to say that what Napster is really offering is rental of their entire catalog, but the model still doesn't account for the fact that most of the time I don't use any of their catalog.

Let's assume for a moment that iTunes tracks worked on all digital music players and Napster charged per listen, then which model, owning or renting, makes more sense? Even putting aside the competition of legally free music (like at my company's website, http://www.garageband.com), neither model is compelling. The service I want is a rent-to-own model. Such a service would have no monthly fee and I could pull over an unlimited number of tracks to a limited number of devices that track how many times I listen to it. Each listen costs me X cents, but counts toward purchase of the track. Any time I make up the difference between the amount I've paid in rentals and the ownership price of the track, the track gets converted to a form with complete fair use portability.

BTW, GarageBand has been busy setting up a partnership with MSN Music. Check it out at http://music.msn.com/garageband. Of course, it's really exciting to bring the marketing power of such a large company to work for independent music, but what makes this effort significant is the impact of being the first company to really break an artist via the Internet.

Today I feel complete. We just launched the last in a series of component improvements to the GarageBand system. Now, I can gladly say that the system works the way it was always meant to work. I'll bore you with the full details of the GarageBand system some other time, but let me explain this most recent improvement as an example that other music companies could follow.

GarageBand unleashed an enormous amount of intelligence and activity by creating a model to review and rank songs without the need for a centralized editorial staff. We developed a way for a large group of non-experts to do what takes a small group of experts much longer. The accuracy of the system requires subdividing songs into contextual categories of manageable size. But the problem was that all existing classification models needed to be managed by a small group of experts. Using one of the old models would just replace one bottle neck with another. So, we created a new paradigm: an Emergent Taxonomy of Music

What we've done should be familiar to those who are aware of the application of genomics to taxonomy in biology. Arguments in biological systemics center on the question: should characteristics (Linnean taxonomy) or evolutionary history (phylogeny) define the categorical relationship among organisims? Comparing genetic maps asks a more direct question: what are the relationships among individual organisims? The categories and the relationship between categories emerge from that.

One company, All Music Guide, has become the de facto musicologist for the internet by creating a fairly comprehensive database of Linnean categorization (styles, mood, instrument, theme, country). The centerpiece of their taxonomy is genre which incorporates all the Linnean factors with reference to an extensive music style history (the music maps). Ultimately, they first ask "What is Rap?" and then ask if a specific song fits that category. While this works fairly well for categorizing a historical body of material, the main problem of applying it to a new music catalog like GarageBand's is that the categories can't predict the new forms of music that are being created.

By contrast a new company, Music Plasma focuses entirely on the relationships between artists, eschewing categorization entirely. In a sense each artist is their own category and is connected in a web with other similar artists. Webs are not confined in the way categories are, because relationships aren't restricted by definitions of genres. While it is not a taxonomy really, the editors of Music Plasma have created a more fluid and relationship minded way of browsing music.

At it's core, GarageBand's new system is like Music Plasma, with one important difference. We have no editors to define the relationship between artists. This is partly by necessity. Our bands are so little known, so plentiful (10x what either of these other sites deal with), and so varied in quality that there is no way we could pay for a large enough editorial staff. Instead the artists themselves create the web of relationships, by writing in three artists they sound like and three artists they are influenced by, and name of the genre of music they play. You can browse from artist to artist via search results for the "sounds like" and "influenced by" and "genre" data.

Despite the difference in process, the new system shares functionality with AllMusic. In addition to browsing the web-like relationships between artists, we make available genre categorization. Again the big difference is there are no editors. In addition to writing in an exact genre name, artists select the closest fit from a prequalified list of genres. This prequalified list is generated automatically according to frequency of exact genres written in. In this way the genre taxonomy emerges organically from the relationships between songs themselves. Moreover, they emerge almost as they are created without the latency of an editorial cycle.

Ultimately, the new genre system is an empirical process rather than a theoretical construct. A genre doesn't exist because experts can describe it and derive it from the model they've already built, but because the categorical word is already in common use. The theoretical model is thus inferred and constantly re-inferred from the data.

You can see the new system in action at http://www.garageband.com/genre

What did we get when we combined a winnebago, an election year, and 100,000 indie bands? We got smelly, very smelly. And dirty, too. The real elements of this experiment?

1. A different set of independent bands in each city rather than one set for all cities
   
2. Municipal venues (parks, amphitheaters), rather than traditional club venues
3. Using press interest as the primary promotional vehicle.

What were the results? Twenty-five great bands. Beautiful outdoor concerts. TV cameras to film intimate crowds.

"Packaged Tours" have become increasingly more common: combining bands from different parts of the country on to one bill and trying to create a regional or national buzz. Labels of all sizes follow this model - smaller labels may actually combine more bands on a bill. The reason for this is that the costs of touring are rising, and well known bands can't even pay the bills (let alone make a profit, which is tough since touring is often a young band's only source of living). So the headlining bands extract "placement fees" from the support bands to cover the bills. Such a situation creates an exploitive centralization where the headliners extract rent from the support bands who hope to someday be tribute-receiving headliners themselves.

By contrast, GarageBand is as much local as it is independent and therefore can structure a large tour that is far more decentralized. Since bands participate on a voluntary basis, the opportunity for cooperation is much greater. In a sense, all the bands act as if there were no headliners. Economically, there isn't the same risk of taking bands to localities where they don't have a natural draw. But the potential is still there to capture the economies of scale of a larger tour (for instance, this time around we had the same sound equipment and staff travel from venue to venue). Each band band gets a smaller piece of a larger, more efficient pie.

Time was when musicians were designated members of a community: like the medic or the milk man. As with many professionals, they decreasingly have a sense of place. They used to live within community and sang songs for and about that community. With the nationalization of pop culture through outlets like MTV, the soundtrack for life in Columbus increasingly comes out of Los Angeles.

By having free concerts in public spaces, I hope ChoozaPalooza went some way towards reversing this trend. Usually these public spaces are used for high profile national touring acts, while local bands are sequestered in dark clubs. It's a hard sell to both bands and fans, but those that participated seemed universally pleased with the results. People that wouldn't have gone to a club, discovered a a new band they liked. And bands mostly saw the concert as an act of civic-mindedness (we brought in non-partisan local voter registration groups) as much as a career opportunity.

I've always been of the opinion that attendance at local events has two key drivers: the number of times and variety of ways people hear about an event. Assuming your promo material adequately speaks to the audience of the event, you compete with other events in creating the appearance that your event is the place to be. Perhaps the riskiest test of the tour was seeing if media publicity could translate into people at the shows. Considering the short time frame and small staff, we did a remarkably good job of attracting media attention. We were covered in three newspapers, two radio stations and one TV station. Measured in publicity the tour did quite well. Measured in people it did worse. The attendance at shows varied from ten to thousands, but on average it was probably less than one hundred. The good news is that we're not in the business of finding novel ways to promote local events and we can fall back on tried and true methods next year.

And yes, we do plan on next year being less smelly.

The GarageBand/Live365 experiment is getting some serious attention. Unfortunately you need to register to see the full article, but the gist of it is there in the summary. What's missing are highlights from a few top bands who credit part of their recent success to GarageBand.

Anthony Rodriguez, recently returned from a tour of Ireland with Pet Project (formerly Sci-Fi Lullaby) said "If it weren't for GarageBand.com, I would have quit music and got a day job. GarageBand is what KROQ was 10 years ago and what KCRW was five years ago. I can't say there is anything more pure and honest yet public left to speak of when it comes to new music."

Anne Heaton currently on tour with Jewel said "Everyone's music gets reviewed, and a lot of times the reviewers are other musicians and songwriters, so the feedback is really helpful and right on,"

I'm really excited to help break these artists and prove the promotional capacity of the internet in the process.

You can see the original press release here:
http://www.garageband.com/htdb/companyinfo/pr062004.html