Please help

Sport Relief

(I should apologise for bringing you here by illicit categorisation and tagging, but I won’t. You might have wasted just 10 seconds. Hopefully you will make the choice to change someone’s world in less than a minute).

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Second Chance Tuesday – Learn from Last.fm

This afternoon I was invited to join Second Chance Tuesday for a rare opportunity to hear first hand, the inspiring story of how three swashbuckling entrepreneurs developed their ground-breaking social music experience, raised angel and venture capital from some of Europe’s most respected investors, guided their user growth to over 20 million active users in 240 countries, and sold to CBS as one of the biggest European Web 2.0 exits to date.

Sound interesting to you? Go register

The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, will be unearthing the secrets of their success, debating the future of online communities and digital content, and posing some more lighthearted questions including whether they still sleep in tents on the roof of their office, and what they plan to do with their share of the $280m. Spend it?

Who’s Who?

Felix Miller is CEO of Last.fm. He came to London from Germany to study in 1997. He met Martin Stiksel at a gig through a mutual friend. He was in a punk band at the time.

Martin Stikselis the co-founder and CCO of Last.fm. Martin came to London in 1995, where he created a sound design company (working on commissions for the likes of MTV and the BBC), before meeting Felix Miller at a gig in the late ’90s. The two of them set up an online record label, before launching Last.fm in 2002.

What is last.fm?

Founded in 2002 in London, Last.fm is the online, social music revolution that connects people with music and artists with listeners. By joining the Last.fm community, music fans can choose to share their music preferences by linking their media player to the Last.fm database. This database is populated continually with over 500 million monthly track submissions from Last.fm music fans. As a result, Last.fm can intelligently recommend songs, artists, local concerts and even other members based on their musical tastes.

Thanks to partnerships with EMI, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG, independent aggregators The Orchard and IODA, and more than 100,000 independent musicians and 20,000 labels that upload music directly to the site, Last.fm can draw recommendations from one of the most extensive online music catalogues.

Second Chance Tuesday is an event for anyone who believes in the power of the internet to change everything, from the way we communicate to the way we entertain ourselves.

Interested in mingling with London’s leading entrepreneurs and investors (as well as some older and wiser faces from the ‘99 dot.com boom) who are helping create the world-changing ideas of tomorrow?

Filed under: 2.0, BBC, Business, CBS, EMI, Entrepreneur, Events, IODA, Music, Online, Second Chance Tuesday, Social Media, Sony BMG, Strategy, The Orchard, User Generated Content, Warner Music Group, Web2.0, dotcoms, last.fm, marketing, startups, venture capital, web 2.0

You may say I’m a dreamer

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try.
No hell below us,
above us only sky.

Imagine all the people
living for today.

Imagine there’s no countries.
It isn’t hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for
and no religion, too.

Imagine all the people
living life in peace.

You may say I’m a dreamer.
But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us
and the world will be as one.

Imagine no possessions.
I wonder if you can.

No need for greed or hunger,
a brotherhood of man.

Imagine all the people
sharing all the world.

You may say I’m a dreamer.
But I’m not the only one.

I hope someday you’ll join us
and the world will live as one.

Perfect in so many ways…..

And if you believe Hit Song Science or HSS for short, which was featured at London Calling this year, we can all be knocking songs out like Lennon in next to no time.

You see HSS is a software package that was developed through extensive mathematical research on other hit songs. And the result? Complex algorithms (1 million songs in the making) are used to compare your uploaded song with other hit songs similar to your song’s algorithms. A score is given in a scale of 1-10, and if your song scores 7.5 and above, then, according to HSS, it would be a hit. If your song scores below 7.5, then maybe not.

This is crazy in so many ways. And yet;

“….the technique, known as Hit Song Science (HSS), picked out the potential of the jazz singer Norah Jones months before she topped the US charts and won eight Grammy awards for her first album. Five major record companies have been so impressed that they are beginning trials of the software, New Scientist magazine reports today.” The London Times

What I hate about this is that songs are placed in clusters, a “universe” of songs. If your song happens to be among the “hit” cluster of similar sounding songs, then your song is considered worthy as a hit.

Hmmmm. In other words, if you have a song that is different to the rest, it is almost certainly not going to be flagged up as a potential hit. It seems being ‘remarkable’ in the HSS world is a bad thing?

And worse still, in HSS’s ideal world your future hits need to be nearly the same as a previous hit, just a tiny bit different.

The website says “Do you want to have your music reach new fans“, “Do you want to be able to know where to best place your music“, “Do you want to know the success potential of your songs within different markets, music lover´s niches, and choose the best channels and targets?“

If I was a musician I would take a leaf out of John Lennon’s book. I suspect he was motivated to write ‘Imagine’ (considered by many as the best song ever written) not by copying hits by other artists, but by his feelings – his feelings of pain when he looked at the world around him.

I suspect greedy record labels and the artists of the future would do well to try the same.

Filed under: Analytics, Computing, Data, Ideas and Riffs, Measurement, Music, Planning, Remarkable, ideas, marketing , Hit Song Science

Mac or PC?

Here’s something for your weekend viewing pleasure.

Hat tip to Miguel Umanzor from thewayiseetheworld.  What a great spoof.

With viewing figures down around their ankles, MTV might be better off playing the odd curveball video like this….

Filed under: Apple, Fun, Mac, Microsoft, Music, Online Video, PC, Viral

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Gil Scott-Heron is an American poet and musician known primarily for his late 1960s and early 1970s work as a spoken word performer.

I’ve seen Gil live a number of times – and can safely say no other performer has ever captivated me more, or indeed captured my imagination, or shaped my thinking as much as Gil.

Gil is best known for his poem and song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. The original lyrics are here, and you can hear an excerpt of the original here.

Latter day spin-offs are widespread. None are as good as the original, but are thought provoking and sometimes amusing none the less.

“The revolution will be brought to you by Apple Mac and PC World, with Nokia and Motorola providing SMS updates.”

“The revolution will operate a job share, or flexitime option so you can have it at your leisure because the revolution will be digitised.”

“The revolution will have a new twist, sponsored by Levis, with a sticker campaign written in an illegible graffiti style font.”

or perhaps you prefer;

The revolution will not be brought to you by Google
In 4 parts of less than ten minutes each.

There will be no pixelated buffering on the youtube.
There will be no pixelated buffering on the youtube.
There will be no pixelated buffering on the youtube.

The revolution will not be right back after a massage
South Park will not be added several times by russian teenagers
Only to be removed for copyright violations.

Filed under: Fun, Ideas and Riffs, Music, Quotes, ideas, marketing

The bells and whistles business

Take away the bells and whistles, drums, guitar, mics, speakers, audio mastering etc and this group remain ‘remarkable’.

If you were to take away the ‘bells and whistles’ of your marketing operation – what are you left with? If you were to take away promotion, offers, advertising, direct mail, email, SEO, “spin”, booklets, tradeshows, leaflets, call centres, seminars, PR campaigns, etc etc – would you be remotely remarkable or memorable?

If you are not left with much – I’d advocate you forget about the bells and whistles for a while and concentrate on improving whats really under the covers of your business.

Focusing on the essence of your company is the only way to truly be remarkable.

Filed under: Music, Strategy, marketing