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Aspen Live Music Conference

I appreciate the love. I really do. Though I’m not entirely sure why it’s coming iggli’s way. Yesterday, I headed up to Aspen, Colorado with Nanette to attend the Aspen Live music conference. On the way, we stopped to pick up Alex White, CEO of The Next Big Sound, and we managed, with the help of Google maps, to take the scenic route from the last leg of the trip between Glenwood Springs to Aspen. But the weather was sunny and the sky and terrain were beautiful.

I knew things were going to be a bit strange when I walked into the conference room, and I was the first person there. This never happens. Never. I seriously wondered whether I had come to the right place. But within ten minutes or so, folks started to trickle in. [Noticeably absent for this session: Bob Lefsetz. We missed you!]

Jim Lewi, the conference organizer and chief rabble rouser, had another personal story to tell. I won’t tell it here. Suffice to say, Jim ALWAYS has something interesting happening. Always. (Jim, I do hope your package arrived.)

As things got underway, Jim laid out the theme for the afternoon’s discussion: Compression of Purchase Decision Time & How it Affects Our Marketing. A couple key ideas drove the conversation:

• consumers are waiting till the last minute to make purchasing decisions
• we’ve somehow managed to train the fan to wait till the last minute to purchase a concert ticket
• the live music experience can be wildly uneven, and some artists just don’t seem to have the capacity to move the entire crowd in the way that others do
• the ticketing fee add-0ns aren’t doing us any favors when it comes to encouraging fans to buy tickets early; they wait till the last minute to save money and keep their options open
• there are some things that “work” for marketing live music, maybe we ought to pay attention to these things and try to figure out what we can do to adopt these practices
• where’s the data?
• why is it that Amazon can speak so personally to its customers, but in the music industry we seem ignorant about so many things, including: who we’re talking to, what they did with us last time, what they want now, how to talk with them, etc.
• “I get so many things from so many promoters, it’s ridiculous and overwhelming.”
• how can we “prime the pump” and provide a good way to get a solid contingent of fans into early decision mode so they can talk about the event, and we can point to them talking about the event?
• is anyone really everaging the sharing that fans do via social media – Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. – by providing them with the content about the show/artist that they can share with their friends?
• fan driven “word-of-mouth” is the best marketing

During the course of these discussions, Jim kept hinting that maybe Tom Higley and iggli had some solutions that could be helpful to the industry. And Jamie Loeb of Nederlander Concerts was kind enough to talk about some of the benefits that iggli provides.

But the truth is, iggli is being oversold. Again, I really appreciate the love. But we still don’t provide the powerful, compelling solution that I envision: a service that every artist, promoter, venue, sports team, agent and ticket seller wants to use to help promote the event and sell more tickets – via fan-based word-of-mouth. We still have a long, long way to go. But in just a few weeks you’ll be able to see real progress. iggli has created the beginnings of a real-time, event based engine for social interaction. And that engine comes with its own API.

Personally, I think it is this social interaction – real-time fan-to-fan event-based conversations – that will provide the industry with the biggest bang for its marketing buck. What do you think? Let me know!

I had a great time today down in Austin, Texas. My panel on Digital Distruption, the first one of the day, included executives from Disney, Sports Illustrated, Electronic Arts and the Houston Rockets. The other three panels focused on ticketing, entrepreneurship and social media.

Red McCombs (a remarkable entrepreneur after whom the business school is named) shared a bunch of colorful stories culled from his long and successful experience as an entrepreneur. Larry Martin of the MBA talked about a couple of particularly interesting startups, including Groupon. Derek Palmer of Tickets.com, spoke about being agnostic about who sells the tickets.

Barry Khan of Qcue, a pioneer in dynamic pricing and Russ Stanley of the San Francisco Giants discussed their test of dynamic pricing with just 2,000 of the SF Giants’ seats. The test was so successful that the project will be expanded next year to include all 40,000 of the available seats.

On the entrepreneur panel, Randy Cohen of Ticket City; Bart Knaggs of Capital Sports & Entertainment; Greg Morrow of SportNet and Gary Hoover (Entrepreneur-in-Residence) shared stories and perspectives about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Passion, passion and more passion. A tolerance for risk. A willingness to sell, sell, sell.

Throughout the conference, the impact of technology and social media was beginning to be apparent. Michael Feferman, from C3 Presents, led the social media panel, which included Jim Lutz of Pro Player Connect (in Nashville) who talked about Pro Player and also about Nimbit – direct artist-to-fan sales; Adam Miner of SportNet; Tommy Landry of RotoExperts; and Nicole Blum of Hashi Productions.

I heard a lot about the need for a deep understanding of analytics. It’s great that we’re able to collect the data, but if we don’t understand what that data means, it isn’t really very helpful. And even if we have the data and know what it means, if we don’t have a plan to execute – the desire and the capacity to take the appropriate actions based on what we have gleaned from the data – that really doesn’t help us much either.

Back in 1993, when I was still a practicing lawyer, I went to lunch with a good friend of mine. He was the head of the Cable Television company, and my law firm represented his company. At the time everyone seemed to be preoccupied with the notion of 500 channels of TV, and he was troubled by this. During our lunch, he turned to me and said,

Now remember, this was before YouTube. It was before social networks. It was even before email and the web were in common use. Nobody was talking much about user generated content in those days. But the truth is, the elements were already there, the groundwork already in place, to precipitate a revolution.

When Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web and Marc Andreesen and his buddies at NCSA created Mozilla, the first really important graphical web browser, they laid the groundwork for an explosion, a big bang in the universe that is “content.” And ironically, from the moment that happened, content has ceased to be “king.” You remember the expression, of course. But “content is king” only when content is scarce, controlled and meted out. Today content is cheaper to create, cheaper to store, and cheaper to distribute than ever before. And there are many many more “producers” of content than there were in 1993. The world will never be the same.

All of this has an enormous impact on music and on the music business. There is more recorded music available today than ever before. Orders of magnitude more music. People listen to more music today than ever before in the history of the world. And increasingly, they’re distributing that music (sharing) and even creating it themselves.

Every copy of Apple’s OSX comes with a copy of Garage Band. Programs like Garage Band, Logic, Ableton Live, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reason, Sonar and others have made it possible for nearly anyone to record or compile “music” that may be completely original (and fall anywhere on the scale from sublime to unbearable) or utterly derivative. Artists have long been treating this vast collection of content as source material for the inspiration and support of their further creative efforts, including Grandmaster Flash, Dr. Dre, The Bastie Boys, Eminem, Moby, and a legion of artists with names that begin with “DJ” and end with pretty much any other word or expression you can imagine.

And the thing that amazes me most about all of this? That the transition from mere spectator to full participant hasn’t been more widely understood, embraced and appreciated. I’d like to introduce you to someone who does get it: Suzanne Lainson. Suzanne writes the blog “brands + music (bpm),” has some interesting things to say about this in the context of music. A week ago, some people from the music, tech and marketing/advertising space got together as part of the Jim Lewi inspired “First Thursday,” here in Boulder. Suzanne was among them, and during the course of our discussions, it became apparent that (a) she’s tired of hearing so many people in the industry say the same things over and over again, and (b) she has a different point of view about what needs to happen – a perspective I happen to share.  Rather than steal her thunder, I invite you to read her most recent post, “Involving Music Fans at Many Levels” for yourself.

One of the things I particularly appreciate about Suzanne’s post: she wants to know what you think, and she asks you to respond. Instead of simply speaking her mind and leaving things at that, she has invited you to join in a conversation – precisely the thing she things needs to be happening in the music industry. And I can’t wait to read what you have to say.

Facebook has provided a new attention-getting tool that you’ll want to know about if you are an artist, promoter, or venue responsible for promoting events, You already know that you can use iggli’s invitation services to leverage the power of email. Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Now Facebook lets you use the @ symbol to get the attention of a particular person. You can read more about the service in the September 15, 2009 edition of Inside Facebook.

Here’s how the new feature works. Suppose you’re posting an update to a band’s status and you want me to know. For example, Crosby, Stills and Nash are playing the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on September 23rd. You go to the status box and type: Hey @ . . . and you’ll be given the option to add the name of any of your Facebook friends. So, you type, Hey @ Tom Higley let’s go see Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Greek! Presto, I get a message saying I’ve been tagged by you in a status update. Give it a try!

A note about CS&N. Their 1969 release was one of the first two albums I ever bought. I was probably 13 or 14 years old. While Young wasn’t yet a member of the group or featured on this recording, he made his appearance on DéjåVu and who could forget Ohio in 1970? Released when I was still a junior in high school, it had a pretty powerful impact on me and on everyone I knew.