I have always hoped there would be a panel titled “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” The next line of Zevon's song is also appropriate for the music industry: "The shit has hit the fan"

Music Hack Day is one of the best events to meet others that are passionate about music and technology. Often people end up making neat or funny (but somewhat pointless) hacks. Sometimes a hack ends up becoming a business. In our case we created the rough initial prototype of Bundio (http://www.bundio.com ), a direct-to-fan subscription platform, at Music Hack Day Boston last November. We've come a long way since then but MHD was where we planted the seed. tl;dr: Attend!

6) Learn to "reframe failure and loss" Entrepreneurs that remain entrepreneurs learn quickly that failure is necessary in order to attain success (or for the glass half empty types: more failure). The guys that started Reddit originally wanted to build a mobile app that delivers sub sandwiches. Constantly release and seek validation. Keep tweaking until there seems to the beginning of something magical then push it forward a bit and see what happens! - Julian

I think the real question should be: "If you care about musicians, should you ditch Spotify?"

Awesome! Benji, Jayce and the rest of the team at PledgeMusic are agile, creative, and care deeply about what they are doing. That's a recipe for success and I'm excited to see where else they take PM.

There is a reason Safari is the most-used browser in mobile and it isn't because it's the best. It is what is pre-installed on the most devices (I believe Apple stated they've sold 600 million iOS devices). iTunes Radio will likely create many new users - people that never used Pandora. If someone has iTunes Match and they were using Pandora with ads I could see them switching. "Free is the most powerful marketing strategy of all time" Absolutely, but how well does it convert? Apple has the easiest path to conversion - if you like the song playing on the radio station you click one button and it's yours. This will be interesting to witness.

I was recently asked to advise a manager about a crowdfunding campaign for an album. Their goal was to raise $X0k. I asked the manager how many backers at the CD level they would need in order to reach the goal. He wasn't sure. The answer was over 1,300 backers at the CD level for an artist that has under 1,000 likes on FB (surely not the most scientific way to measure a fanbase, but it's certainly a starting point). The biggest reason that music crowdfunding campaigns fail is because the artist/management is not realistic when considering how much they can actually raise from their fanbase. The second biggest reason for failure is not valuing rewards correctly. Perhaps the artist/management believes their framed handwritten lyric sheet is worth hundreds of dollars but their fans think it is only worth $50. It could be the other way around and artists undervalue their rewards but that is probably a less frequent phenomenon. I think this was a case of believing you can jump (launch a crowdfunding campaign) and a net (engaged fanbase) will appear. It doesn't work that way...

Sure, bands are startups. They need a community manager. Startups have a few people working on a bunch of tasks that larger organizations would delegate to separate individuals. Bands are the same way. The drummer may book shows, the singer might manage social media, the guitarist may handle press ops, etc. Relationships are obviously very relevant when it comes to converting a non-paying fan into a paying fan but the point of this article was the role of YouTube and subscriptions services in the discovery and conversion funnel. This is certainly an interesting discussion that deserves a follow up post that is more related to the topic you are so passionate about. I appreciate all of the thoughts you have shared thus far. - Julian

There's no problem with what you want to talk about. The problem is where you want to talk about it. It almost doesn't bother me because the more comments below the article the more people will read it. What I take issue with is how entirely off-topic you are and how that could detract from conversations about the post. You have a blog. Have this discussion there. Or find a more relevant post on Hypebot to have this discussion. The topics you bring up are irrelevant to this post which is about converting someone who found an artist's music on YouTube or Spotify into a paying customer. Sure, it's about relationships, but not the kind that you seem to be implying.

"What I am trying to do is to open up the discussions so that we cover relationship management in further depth." A comment section beneath an article about subscription services is not the correct place for this.

You seem to be searching for a one-size fits all solution... There isn't one. There never will be. All artists are different people and no two are exactly alike. Knowing who you are as an artist and a human being, understanding what your fans want and what you feel comfortable giving them; these are all crucial. I don't think any managers or consultants can (or should) tell an artist this but they can provide some guidance in deciding. - Julian

This has veered from the topic of my post but I think it is worthy of discussion because it still concerns engagement. There are artists. There are celebrities. Some people are both. Engagement does not mean that you need to invite your fans over for dinner with your family. Engagement does not imply any real-world interaction must take place-though I feel it is usually a very important aspect. The word fan is derived from fanatic. Fanatic is defined as, "a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, esp. for an extreme religious or political cause." Sounds more like a stalker than what we would typically identify as a fan. I cannot advise you on what kind of musicians to work with but I believe strongly that being able to resonate with your audience base is crucial in this connected world. Even Justin Timberlake writes letters to his fans showing how much they mean to him. Thank you for commenting. - Julian

Thanks for the comment James, We need to think past Klout scores and other "black box" metrics. These are more for vanity than anything else as they do not provide much in the way of actionable data. Being more observant of who is sharing your links, writing about you, bringing their friends to shows - I think these metrics are more meaningful. Engagement and discovery will continue to occur on social media platforms but, like I state in this article, the focus should be on bringing the new fans into your ecosystem and eliminating the distraction of the social networks and the millions of other tracks on Spotify. - Julian

This is good. I want a solution that is integrated into the application that I already use to listen to music. The problem with most music discovery solutions is that they want to change where I consume the content.

These statistics mean very little. You are comparing very specific terms to ambiguous ones.

A&R people must be the least efficient form of filtering. They aren't actually filters, they are gatekeepers. What makes your comment even more perplexing is that you cannot, "Save copyright!" or "Bring back music labels!" and somehow stop people from uploading terrible videos to YouTube.

"These days I notice you only seem to air reality shows with really horrible and vapid people and I just wondered why don't you play music videos anymore."

3 months ago MVSCLES, a Boston electronic future pop duo released "sweet n sour." (http://soundcloud.com/mvscles/sweet-n-sour) It was a song that was so new and catchy that it spread like wildfire through Boston and online. It now has 48,900 plays on SoundCloud alone. MVSCLES waited a whole month before dropping their second song called "where you are." (http://soundcloud.com/mvscles/where-you-are) This song was a bit different in feel and sound than the one track that their listeners had as their sole definition but it went over just as well. It now stands at 39,168 SoundCloud plays in just 2 months. I think digital singles with a set release cycle makes sense because it builds anticipation much like a TV show when you are dying to see the next episode and know it's an entire week that you will need to wait. Building anticipation and then surpassing expectations are both keys to success with this content shipping strategy.

Very interesting idea. I think we need to democratize content curation online and Reddit has always done this with other types of media. It will be interesting to see if this becomes widely adopted in a community that is very open to new ideas and original material.

To give credit where it's due I learned about this from Seth Godin's fantastic TED talk (http://bit.ly/13TcGe). Very enlightening, I highly recommend you check it out.

It is only a matter of time before Eventbrite becomes the industry leader. As long as Ticketmaster/Live Nation/Etix continue to insult fans with outrageous fees and other annoyances there is no path for them other than the road to perdition. I paid $22 in "convenience" fees PER $103 ticket through Etix to Bruce Springsteen at Fenway Park with an additional $4.85 order fee. 48.85 (fees) / 254.85 (total cost) = 19% of total cost for two concert tickets was for the fees.

Great news. I loved his song "Do Without" that he also performed on Opie & Anthony (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46UPRqBVVmc). Happy to hear he is trying to clean up his life and make some more music.

The guy who invented sliced bread was a failure but the guy who knew how to sell it was not.

I'm happy the buzzwords got you interested enough to read a post about shipping costs. Keep some of the thoughts in mind for when you decide to do a physical release of "Join The Lost Cause" or your next project. Best, Julian

Absolutely Yannick, One must be careful about the words used to draw the "right" people in. The difference I see is that those names can be misconstrued by humans and search engines but they were not intentionally buzzwords. Best, Julian