Gerd Leonhard's Blog on The Future of Music, Media & Entertainment

mashboxx: Sony BMG goes P2P

this was >big news last week>: sony bmg teaming up with Grokster. sounds like the start of a great thing to me -- congrats to the new team at Sony - BMG.

Sony Stream Man

interesting look at SNS's StreamMan here. My comment :

pass-along and EBay

from Digital Music News: (great site, btw -- do sign up!)

eBay Bids Higher for Digital Music

eBay has taken its first serious step into the digital music waters, recently pairing with Tennessee-based start-up PassAlong Networks. The new service is tentative, part of a "180-day digital music pilot program eBay established to gauge the interest of its 114 million registered users in digital downloading." PassAlong will feature content from all four major labels, with 200,000 tracks ramping up to 500,000 by month`s end. Auction-based prizes will kick off the launch, including a special phone
call and album download from Avril Lavigne.

The eBay site will not feature open bidding on downloads, keeping prices fixed at $0.99. eBay users can purchase the tracks using the "Buy It Now" functionality. That structure is a disappointment to those interested in seeing some variable pricing experimentations, even if some reserves were
imposed. But special promotions like the Lavigne giveaway will always be auction based.

PassAlong is a newcomer to the space, unveiling both the eBay relationship and its own store at passalong.com Thursday. The company is taking an interesting stab at viral distribution, offering rewards points for referrals that result in purchases. That essentially enlists customers as salespeople and fosters an online community. Other incentives encourage larger purchases, with one free download offered for every ten paid downloads.

eBay Part II: Who Is PassAlong?

The recent eBay announcement has placed PassAlong, a little-known digital
music company, into the spotlight. So who are these guys? The Franklin,
Tennessee-based digital music store is a 60-person startup headed by Dave
Jaworski. The web-based store offers many of the same things that larger
competitors like Napster and iTunes do, including $0.99 downloads and :30
previews. PassAlong has so far only licensed 200,000 major label tracks,
with plans to ramp up to a more competitive 700,000 by October.

But the twist for PassAlong lies in its viral approach, with members gaining
points for referring new downloaders. Tracks can be passed via a number of
delivery mechanisms, including instant messenger platforms from Yahoo, MSN
and AOL. In October, the company will launch its Discover Music service,
which will allow users to publish playlists for others to view. Tastemakers
will then be in a position to gain lots of points, with users checking
certain key accounts to find out about new music.

For PassAlong, the eBay deal is just one of many. The company has plans to
outsource its viral technology to others services, and could even become a
competitor to services like MusicNet down the road. But PassAlong will also
have a standalone store, which it plans to make competitive. That could be a
tall order, with heady competition from the likes of Yahoo/MusicMatch,
iTunes, Napster, and RealNetworks.

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My take: FINALLY some momentum is coming back into this market. Lot's of smart new players!

Ebay enters the music business

with a firm called PassAlong networks. Sounds like a great idea -- read more here

Popkomm IMEA 2004 finalists announced

I am involved with popkomm 2004, as producer and chairman of the 2004 Innovations in Music and Entertainment Awards (IMEA), on Oct 1, 2004, in Berlin, at the ICC.

Today, we announced the 12 finalists ... here's some details on them. Check it out!

The premier edition of the Popkomm Innovations in Music and Entertainment Award (IMEA) has attracted hundreds of applicants from all over the world,despite the short lead-time, and a VIP jury of industry veterans and experts has been assembled to select the IMEA 2004 winner. It is IMEA’s goal to find the most powerful and market-relevant innovations and new ventures in the music & entertainment sector, worldwide, and present them to the jury and an audience of industry professionals and the media.

12 finalists will present their projects on October 1 (5 pm) as the ‚grand-finale’ of Popkomm 2004. Presenting companies come from the U.S., the UK, Germany and Austria, and span many sectors of the industry, including Mobile Music and Marketing, Online Radio, Online Distribution, business-to-business solutions and New Music Devices.

The IMEA 2004 jury is composed of industry veterans and experts: Tim Renner (former CEO Universal Music Germany), Rupert Perry (former President EMI Europe, and former Chairman, IFPI), Jeremy Silver (CEO of Sibelius Software, London, and former CEO, Uplister, Inc), Nick Ashton-Hart (Executive Director, International Music Managers Foundation, London), Jim Griffin (CEO, Cherry Lane Digital, and well-known Digital Music Visionary, Washington / DC, USA), David Hyman (Chief Strategy Officer, Gracenote, USA), and Gerd Leonhard (CEO, Thinkandlink.biz, former CEO of LicenseMusic.com, Inc, Founder and CEO of MetaNodes.com), who will chair the jury. Each finalist will have 8 minutes to present their venture, and following a short general vote by the audience the jury will decide on the winner and announce the 2004 IMEA award winner right after a short break.

These are the 12 finalists.

Weed / Shared Media Licensing www.weedshare.com Seattle, USA. Weed is an innovative and complete solution to the problem of unauthorized distribution of music and media files on the Internet. The company recognized that file-sharing has many positive aspects that can be utilized to the benefit of the creators, and Weed’s unique software solution (which is based on Microsoft’s latest DRM products) effectively rewards constructive and legitimate file-sharing activities. When a user buys a Weed file, money from the transaction goes to the artists / rightsholders, but also to the users who previously bought the file and may have shared it with the next users. In this manner, file-sharers are rewarded for doing the right thing, and Weed earns incremental revenues from each transaction. Weed was developed by Shared Media Licensing, Inc. (SML), a company formed by software developers and musicians based in Seattle, USA. SML has filed patents internationally regarding its system for modifying and tracking files, and the company has recently run a widely publized promotion with the band ‘Heart’.

Playlouder www.playloudermsp.com London, UK
PlayLouderMSP is a broadband ISP that bundles legal access to music with broadband internet access. It is the first ISP in the world to licence from music rights owners the right for its subscribers to freely download and share music and hence the first to monetize P2P file-sharing for music rights owners - a broadband ISP that is able to monitor, manage, control and account for the sharing of music files by individual users employing peer to peer (P2P) file sharing applications. This allows PLAYLOUDER to offer legal file sharing bundled with a broadband connection. The consumer proposition can be summarized as unlimited legal music downloads included with your broadband connection. PlayLouder MSP has been born out of two existing complementary businesses: PlayLouder (est. 2000), a digital music and media company that operates a successful music portal and provides business to business services to the music industry; and State51 (est. 1994), an award-winning software development company. Bulldog Communications, the UK broadband specialist recently bought by Cable & Wireless, is the company’s wholesale supplier of broadband access.

Last.fm www.last.fm London, UK
Last.fm offers a unique and addictively entertaining streaming radio service, where users build up their individual music profiles by listening to customized (multicast) music streams, and skip / ban songs that they don’t like, or click a ‘love this song’ - button on songs they do like. Last.fm Ltd’s two divsions, www.last.fm and the collaborative filtering software www.audioscrobbler.com, both help their users to quickly find new music by connecting them to people who have similar music taste. The system remembers what music you listened to (profiling), then compares your list of ‘liked music’ with the lists of other, similar users and recommends other tracks you might like (collaborative filtering). Audioscrobbler is offering free, open source plugins for all major media players such as iTunes, Winamp and WMP. Once installed, the plugin builds up the user’s music profile by sending artist-, album- and song-name of music listened to via the media player to Last.fm. Last.fm Ltd was founded in November 2002, currently has around 120.000 registered users and is collaborating with around 2500 record labels around the world. The privately funded company has already won several innovation awards and is gaining users very rapidly.

GoFresh Mobile Music www.gofresh.com Munich, Germany
Gofresh Mobile Music is the first "Mobile Music Label" in Europe. Gofresh Mobile Music (GMM) develops, produces and markets Mobile Music and Mobile Music applications for 3G mobile phones throughout Europe. It is a top priority for GMM to guarantee highest quality as well as maximum music experience to our customers, partners and those interested in music, therefore the company develops its own applications, conversion procedures and music tools for GMM artists and their producer platforms. With its "Mobile Music" division, Gofresh offers high quality ring-tones with voices and effects especially developed with Gofresh artists such as Super Smart. With the upcoming launches of UMTS the GMM formats portfolio is expected to grow quickly; to date over 1.5 Million full-length tracks have already been sold via GMM channels. GMM is active in Spain, Italy, Austria and Germany, partnering with companies such as EPlus, Wind, Telefonica and T-Online.

KODIME Ltd www.kodime.com London, UK
KODIME Ltd is a new generation Mobile Solution & Content Service Provider. The company creates and licenses solutions that empower Mobile Marketing and Mobile Content Delivery, increasing revenues and visibility for businesses in music, media, and marketing. Kodime’s applications are made available exclusively over the web (broadband) requiring no hard- or software installation. KODIME wholly owns the wireless data platform KOMOBILITY, and has created and successfully launched three tailored mobile services: PROPtxt™ (Property), ZOOMtxt™ (Advertising & Marketing) and STARtxt™ (Music & Entertainment). STARtxt™ enables bands, artists, managements, music publishers, labels, venues and others to actively participate in the mobile content & marketing markets, creating and selling innovative offerings including but not limited to ringtones, truetones, wallpapers, mobile video, SMS and MMS fanclubs, SMS-enabled downloads and streams and more. STARtxt™ gives Kodime’s clients full control over their content, their user-base and customers, and allows non-technical staff to plan and execute mobile marketing campaigns. Kodime’s Directors include Nico Köpke, (former Senior Vice President eMedia, Sony Music), and Scott Lawrence, (former Director Online Technologies, Sony Music). The company has established clients and partnerships in the UK, Australia, Southafrica and the US, including EMI Music Publishing, Katie Melua, Heaven 17, The London Symphony Orchestra, BMG UK, Jones Lang Lassalle, and the London Architecture Biennale.

DJinTheMix www.djinthemix.com London, UK
DJintheMix a unique media promotion company that promotes new pre-release dance and electronic music to radio DJ’s, journalists and club DJ’s in the UK and Europe, using an on-line DJ reaction system showing the DJ’s reactions to the labels within 24hrs. Each DJ / User has their own unique password-protected login area, allowing them to access the promotional offerings. The company does not email MP3 files as attachments, but rather makes available preview and digital links within each DJ’s login area - this gives the DJ control of what music to receive and at what time they wish to do so, it also allows DJinTheMix and the Record Label (client) to control the distribution. The DJ database is alerted, by e-mail and SMS that new music is available for selection. The DJ’s can preview each mix before selecting the ones they want to play and they then react online to each mix they have selected. The record label (client) is given their own unique password-protected login area - allowing them to access the reaction data for the tracks they are promoting at any time. The reaction pages are available in 15 single UK radio demographic areas or all areas combined from Scotland, Ireland, Wales & England. Clients include Def Jam, Universal, EMI, Sony, V2, EMAP and 100 smaller labels from all over the world.

Go4Music www.g4music.de Munich, Germany
go4music is owned by DAYDREAM MUSIC. DAYDREAM, founded in 1989, and is A leading German freelance agency for music supervising in the field of feature film, TV production and advertisement. The agency has supervised more than 300 national and international projects, including Run Lola Run, Faraway So Close, and the Neverending Story. go4music offers first-class and previously unused song material for film and commercial producers through a Click & License setup. The company collaborates with artists, producers and leading labels from varying European music scenes, the library material is up to date and highly professional – no impersonal preserves from dusty archives. At go4music the rights are transferred with no limits in term, location and content by Click & License. Fast access – 24 hours a day – 7 days a week, instantly. The costs remain reasonable and are immediately displayed.

Moodmixer www.moodmixer.com Hamburg, Germany
PWsoft, the parent company of Moodmixer, presents the “UniversalMixMaschine” which can select music for individual playlists more intuitively than any other software. Pwsoft, a start-up from Hamburg, Germany has developed a new software component called “the UniversalMixMachine” that can automatically select music from a given list by using a dynamic formula. The music selection is controlled by a set of criteria or their range and a weighting of each song. Songs with a higher weighting will be selected relatively more often, making sure that the music is being distributed intuitively throughout the playlist but without any song being used too frequently. The UniversalMixMachine can be used in multiple applications such as jukeboxes, players, for music-on-demand systems or streaming services, radio automation, and the like. Customers who want to test the functionality of the UniversalMixMachine component can create playlists with PWsoft’s Winamp Plugin “Moodmixer” which is available as shareware for private use. Its Mixer produces non-stop music, which instantly changes if the "mood settings" are being altered.

StreamMan / SonyNetServices, www.sonynetservices.com Salzburg, Austria
StreamMan is the world’s first personalized mobile music service, giving you instant access to music, artist information and entertainment content whenever you like, wherever you are. StreamMan works on your Mobile phone and PC enabling you to find, organize, discover, share and listen to music anytime and anywhere. StreamMan features a unique personalization engine that allows you to tune the music by rating the artist or the song while the music is playing and thus turning the music into your personal Channel. To start your Channel simply chose a sample song, a mood, a genre or another characteristic of your favourite music. Arrange your personal top hits in playlists and share your preferences with the StreamMan community. StreamMan offers thousands of songs at your fingertips from a wide range of major and independent repertoire – both new releases and back catalogue pearls all including detailed artist information. Through unique means of discovering, personalizing, listening and enjoying music on your Mobile phone and on your PC, StreamMan is the leading solution for demanding users to easily access music in all situations and at all times.

Sourcemusic: “find. Listen. Contact. License” (www.sourcemusic.biz ) Hamburg, Germany
Sourcemusic offers a new, free B2B online research service at the intersection of music and film/video for professionals in the film, video, multimedia and advertising business. The company provides an intuitive search engine for research in the more than 4000 track repertoire of the involved independent Berlin music production companies, labels and music publishers that have teamed up form the ‘Berlin Label Commission’. The combined catalog includes rock and pop, all-time favorites, contemporary cult and highly specialized niche repertoire from techno to jazz as well as current new releases. With the aid of an "interactive filter" developed by the company’s technology provider aiLab Network (www.ailab.de) the user can limit his search to music matching his requirements, and can immediately listen to titles found, using a flash radio player. In many cases master rights and publishing is held by the same rights owner which significantly increases the efficiency of handling a licensing request, and many songs can be cleared for worldwide use within 24 hours. Sourcemusic offers direct personal contact, competent advice and the quickest possible clearing of the necessary rights, in many cases for worldwide use and within 24 hours.

Jukecharts - The digital music sampling and promotion system www.jukecharts.com Berlin, Germany
Digital track sampling, promotion, chart generation. Jukecharts is a digital sampling and rating system for the pre-testing and promotion of dance tracks before the official release. It gives producers, labels and publishers the ability to offer their unreleased music tracks to a panel of music professionals online, and retrieve opinions and ratings. Members of the panel, in return, get access to selected unpublished tracks. Jukecharts generates transparent and objective trend charts, and offers various usage parameter reports in real time. The intuitive user interface includes a player to preview the tracks. Panel members listen to streamed music; a download is provided only on explicit demand of the user and on decision of the label. Jukecharts generates statistic reports about ratings, numbers of streamed downloads and placement developments in the charts over the past 8 weeks. Furthermore, Jukecharts offers additional community functions such as chat rooms, track comment functions and a personalized user space to keep an eye on certain tracks.

last.fm

check out last.fm - hip online radio with a great recommendation / collaborative filtering engine. Great stuff!!

Innovations in Music and Entertainment, Contest & Award at Popkomm 2004

My company, ThinkAndLink, is collaborating with www.popkomm.de for the annual Popkomm Innovations in Music & Entertainment Contest and Awards. Applicants can apply via the website below, until Sept 1, 2004, and the show is on Oct 1, in Berlin / Germany.

PRESS RELEASE 28.07.2004

Awards at the Popkomm 2004 for the best new ideas in music and entertainment

• Berlin to host the Popkomm IMEA Awards on 1 October for the first time
• An invitation to creative enterprises to submit their entries at www.popkomm.de
Deadline 1 September 2004

Berlin, 28 July 2004 – At the Popkomm 2004 the best innovative business ideas in music and entertainment will receive the Popkomm IMEA 2004 Awards, to be presented in Berlin for the first time on 1 October at the world’s leading forum for music and entertainment. The IMEA Awards (Innovations in Music & Entertainment) are co-organised by the Popkomm GmbH and Gerd Leonhard, CEO of the consultancy ThinkAndLink (Basle/San Francisco).

As of now creative enterprises can submit their entries at www.popkomm.de/imea2004. The deadline is 1 September 2004. A jury will then make a preliminary selection of the applications sent in. At the Popkomm (29 September to 1 October) ten candidates will present their projects to the audience and to a jury of experts whose members will be announced in August of this year. Finally, both the jury and the audience will select the winners. Prizes will include an exhibition stand free of charge at the Popkomm 2005, five accreditations and 20 guest passes for next year, as well as the opportunity to hold a press conference at the Popkomm 2005.

Popkomm’s project manager Katja Bittner: ”We are looking for people with new visions for the future, people who have ideas for music and entertainment projects which are both innovative and relevant. We are already looking forward to the many exciting new developments ahead.“ Gerd Leonhard: “The premiere of the Popkomm in Berlin is the ideal setting for these ground-breaking awards. Bright people and bright ideas have a perfect forum here.“

The awards will focus on the innovations which occur when technology and the world of music and entertainment meet. Gerd Leonhard: “The music business is in urgent need of both revolutionary but also realistic and profitable new ideas. What goes on here will sooner or later be taken up by other media.“ Thus besides rewarding the creators of new business concepts for music enterprises, the Popkomm IMEA 2004 Awards will also be interested in innovative B2B projects, mobile content concepts, and developments in the fields of encoding and security systems.

All applications must be in English and applicants must be able to supply proof of a project’s originality. Projects must have reached a stage at which a presentation of actual results and ways of applying them can take place, the presentation to be made by the founders or directors of the company. They in turn will give assurances that experienced enterprises in the relevant field are collaborating in realising their ideas.

From 29 September to 1 October many representatives of the German and international music and entertainment industry will be meeting on the Berlin Exhibition Grounds at Popkomm 2004. With a change of venue, dates that conform to the industry’s requirements and a wealth of new material, Popkomm is effectively meeting the challenges presented by the international music business. Not only is this one of the world’s main events for the industry, it also covers various associated fields such as advertising, films, fashion and consumer electronics. The increasingly international approach is underlined by a new concept involving partnership by a selected country, and this year France will be acting as the partner for Popkomm 2004. This event is organised by Popkomm GmbH, Berlin.

Bluebeat.com - Digital Radio Done right

JULY 21
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contacts:
Elisabeth Caren / George Cabico
B|W|R Public Relations
310.248.6160 / 310.248.6177
ecaren@bwr-la.com / gcabico@bwr-la.com

BLUEBEAT.COM LAUNCHES “BLUE SUMMER SPECIAL”: WORLD’S FIRST FREE, CD-QUALITY COPY-PROTECTED
DIGITAL RADIO

400,000 Tracks and 320 Channels of Pure Listening Pleasure

Santa Cruz, CA, July 21, 2004 – In the first demonstration of its content and customer rights management technologies, Bluebeat.com, a subsidiary of Media Rights Technologies (MRT)--a leading provider of copy-control and superdistribution software--today announced the official launch of its free digital radio offering at www.bluebeat.com. The service features over 400,000 tracks of near CD-quality in over 100 genres and 320 channels, covering more than a century of music, and streams secure MP3s at 320k per second, using MRT’s proprietary secure MP3 format X1 SeCure Recording Control.

“The real clincher in Online and Digital Radio is good sound quality and file format, and conversely, the lack of meaningful content security & copy control. So far, few online broadcasters have opted to go beyond a bit rate of 128k / second, mainly due to piracy and copying concerns. Because it has been so easy to convert, ‘rip’ or save just about any audio stream on the Internet, the content owners and rights holders have wanted to keep the audio quality fairly low so that no one would want to engage in such an activity within the hundreds of digital radio channels that are currently available on the Net. This has led to a very poor music listening experience, in terms of fidelity. Bluebeat.com uses MRT’s X1 SeCure technology which makes it next to impossible for an average user to save, record, convert or otherwise ‘transcode’ the audio streams on the Bluebeat.com site, and this fact allows us to broadcast at near-CD quality without running the risk of copyright infringement by tech-savvy users”, says Hank Risan, Founder of Bluebeat.com, and CEO of Bluebeat’s parent company Media Rights Technologies, Inc (www.mediarightstech.com)

The launch of Bluebeat.com follows MRT’s exciting launches of two product offerings: the X1 SeCure Recording Control, which is geared to protect and enhance digital music services, webcasters, and other online entertainment providers and the DVD SeCure which reliably and effectively controls the copying of DVD content on a PC.

Gerd Leonhard and Kelli Richards, Digital Media Experts and Senior Advisers to the company, add: “Bluebeat is by far the best-sounding, best programmed, and most colorful digital radio service available, to date, and MRT’s X1 technology makes it possible. Online Radio will never be the same!” Bluebeat.com will operate under the no-charge motto ‘give us your email address, and we’ll give you Bluebeat’, from now until September 30, 2004. After that, Bluebeat plans to offer a simple ‘pay as you go’ option, with subscription prices to be determined but anticipated to start as low as 15 cents USD per day, per subscriber.

About Music Rights Technologies
Media Rights Technologies, founded in 2001 as Music Public Broadcasting (MPB), is located in Santa Cruz, California. MRT creates, markets and licenses software that provides content-control solutions for digital media, enabling the superdistribution of media and intellectual property, whether it be music or books, movies or software.

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MediaRights Technologies

Effective immediately I joined Media Rights Technologies as Senior Advisor.

A very good comment on MRT was published just now, at DRMwatch.com

EasyMusic -- finally, Stelios does it!

I have been waiting for this for 2 years- EasyMusic.com --- Stelios knows his turf! watch out for Stelios kicking ass, just like he did in the airline business. I wonder if he hangs out with Richard Branson... The story is here...