As I promised a month ago, I’ve started a series of member dinners/ lunches/phone calls/coffee-hours around the country to solicit feedback from all of you about Sonicbids.

I want to know what you like about it, what you don’t like about it, and how we can make it work even better for you. Running a company is kind of like being in a band: you need constant feedback in order to get better and improve and to keep delivering the goods.

The New York dinner took place last Wednesday in a Greek restaurant called Ethos (I try to have these events at Greek or Mediterranean places as they seem like natural extensions of my house, more hospitable if you will – plus I know what to order). Aliki in our office (also from Cyprus) did a great job arranging the get-together.

I really enjoyed meeting everyone who came to the dinner: Adam (who manages Justin Nozuka); Jessi (who I just found that she also works at BMI), Oli (who is a fellow Berklee alumnus); David from the d_Cyphernauts (a member since 2004); Josephine from France; Eric from the band Ming Dynasty and who just booked a tour using Sonicbids; and Natalie Gelman, who’s amazing feedback and ideas I thoroughly enjoyed (I also learned a whole lot about the way that she uses Twitter).

I am always blown way by two things: the diversity of the Sonicbids membersip and how entrepreneurial Sonicbids members are. This is what I mean when I talk about the “artistic middleclass”: people from all walks of life, who make a living playing music, and who feel empowered to pursue their careers by leveraging all the tools that the Internet offers.

Basically, the constructive feedback that I got was this:

- Sonicbids offers a great place for bands to find and book gigs and many of you are using it as an integral tool to book tours, get licensing deals and develop your career. This is good stuff but of course I am out there looking for things to improve. These are:

- We need to offer a whole lot more information with our gig listings. Right now, the way that gig listings are designed, don’t always give the necessary information to decide if something is always appropriate to submit to;

- We need to offer more community tools so artists can interact not just with promoters but with each other;

- The ability to read and leave feedback for promoters and listings is important. In general, more information sharing is a must;

- Artists want to get feedback too;

- The whole “all genres” thing in the gig listings is annoying. No festival books all kinds of genres;

- It would be great if for certain types of gig listings (like colleges), we enable artists to choose an auto-fill options so you don’t have to type in the same answers over and over again;

- The status manager is problematic and it needs to change. Too many promoters just don’t ever bother getting back to bands after they submit and pay their hard earned money;

- More gig listings that offer access to radio stations and colleges would be great;

What I find interesting is that your feedback is consistent. I got very much the same stuff from the lunch that I hosted in Toronto and the call that I had yesterday with a few members in DC (more on this in a subsequent post). Of course I will continue being out there, meeting many of you and I am determined to stay on top of what we need to do to keep being an important tool for developing your DIY careers.

The good news is that we are listening. Many of these changes are already in the works and nothing will make me happier than launching some of these live in the next few months.

Stay tuned and keep those suggestions coming in. More updates shortly.

Panos

Last week Live Nation announced that it did another so called “360” deal, this time with the band Nickleback. (Nickleback is for all intents and purposes the musical equivalent of a McDonald’s Value Meal: cheap, bland, one-size fits all and unhealthy but some will tolerate it if desperate).

According to Live Nation the deal “will enable us to fully capitalize on our vertically integrated platform” and “structured to increase our revenue and cash flow potential significantly, while reducing our risk profile… this investment is cross collateralized… ” and on and on.  I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining John Hammond, the legendary A&R man from the 50s, 60s and 70s, joyfully making that statement after signing Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen to Columbia Records back in the day. Ahh, times they are a-changin’.

For those of you who have not heard the term “360 Deal” it basically means that an artist (though I hesitate to use the term to describe Nickleback) gets one big advance check from a company like Live Nation, which in exchange gets rights to that artist’s record sales, touring income, merchandise sales, publishing, etc. In the past nine months or so, Live Nation has spent over half-a-billion dollars making these types of deals with Madonna, U2, Jay Z, the Jonas Brothers, Shakira, etc.

If you read most of the press articles out there, they’ll have you believe that these deals are the savior of the modern music business and that companies like Live Nation are pointing the way to a brave new future. Moses and Abraham Lincoln all rolled into one. Wall Street’s response to all these cheerful pronouncements? Since Live Nation started doing these deals, its stock price is down about 53% compared to an 18% drop of the Dow Jones average during the same period.

I’ll let the financial analysts tell you why they think Live Nation is worth less than half it was last October but my problem with these deals boils down to this:

First, there’s nothing original about them. Berry Gordy did these deals with Motown 45 years ago. Groups like the Supremes, the Temptations and the Jackson 5 were literally owned by Motown. Record sales, touring, TV appearances, likeness, TV rights etc.  The whole thing. It was good while it lasted and then the artists decided that they did not like to be told what to wear, how to walk or what kind of music they should perform and how often. No one likes to be “owned”.

They don’t benefit the artist. Let’s face it, there is not a single company out there that can be equally adept at selling records, selling tickets, producing tours, moving merchandise sales, running websites, administering publishing rights, managing fan clubs, monitoring airplay, signing sync-licensing deals, exploiting image rights, running PR campaigns, managing social media sites, monitoring blogs, etc. That control should remain with the artist and his/her team who outsource all these activities to a host of other entities who are specialists. Specialization not concentration is the future.

They don’t benefit the music-loving public. When you take big bets with advances, your first and primary motive is to recoup – quickly. Time and again, when money is the only motivation, art, and by extent the public, suffers. Just check out any Marlon Brando movie that was done just for the money. Or, any Elvis Presley post-army service movie for that matter. Or most reunion tours. There’s no spark, no passion, no oomph. For art to flourish, there always needs to be a patron, but the artist needs to control the timeframe and the creation.

They don’t benefit the dealmaker. I personally fail to see how blowing the equivalent of a small nation’s GDP on a bunch of stars way past their earning prime makes any sense. I mean, how many more records and tours does Madonna have in her? Even for younger groups, the deals only make sense if they are able to reach a mass audience. But as all trends show, the future of the music business is not mass, it’s niche.

They are not the future. One just needs to take a look at two trends to realize that the future of music is not in mass-reaching artists and bloated big budget marketing: record sales of major label releases are going down each year; and the average age of artists that consistently sell large seat venues is going up. The future belongs to the niche.

As I mentioned many times before, the future of the music business is not in the mass-reaching elite that dominated the industry for so many years, but in the niche-reaching artistic middle class that controls both the means of production and distribution and marketing. These middle class artists will outsource all non-essential activities not to one firm but to a host of specialists.

Panos

Allow me to apologize for the short silence with my postings — just returned from a much needed vacation (though a bad case of salmonella kinda took the air out of the fun).

When I was at NXNE I had the chance to talk with Bambi Blue from TransCanadaRadio.com and she recently posted the MP3 clip of our interview on their website. You can check it out, at TransCanadaRadio.com. While you are at it, check out the rest of the site and interviews that are posted there.

This is what I am talking about when I say that bloggers are quickly becoming as influential in the new music scene as more main stream publications that everyone knows about but many of you probably don’t bother reading any more.

Panos