Eric Beall (Berklee) is one of my favorite bloggers within the music industry. Over the last year, I have probably learned as much from Eric as anyone in the industry. Thanks Eric.

Last month or so, Eric wrote a post titled "The Best Kind of Feedback". I have taken his survey suggestions and dropped them into the new song survey module on Music Xray. (This is like the SONGsurvey tool that I had on SONGboost)..

Music Xray users can design any song survey they want.

Click here to try the Song Survey I created.

What survey questions (for a short/quick survey to use within the industry) should I add or subtract?  (picture below)

I hate getting notes from bands that want me to check out their myspace page.  The myspace music player is completely infuriating to use.  Artists, please use bandcamp, soundcloud, music xray or anything that makes it easy for people within the industry to rapidly check out your songs.

In a post last week, I errantly added a zero to my millions.  $50,000,000 should have been $5,000,000.  A reader pointed out that I had increased the size of the music industry to $100,000,000,000 in annual revenue.  It would not have been so embarassing if it had not taken me eight comments to get my head screwed on straight.  Thanks Suzzanne!

I like The Hector Fund. No reason given.

http://twitter.com/brucewarila

This is a quick follow up to my post from yesterday.

Craigslist continues to squeeze the life out of the newspaper industry by offering free classifieds ads. Consider how a widely promoted, free music directory of highly qualified music would be disruptive to the combination of radio and record labels.

The score on commercial radio and record labels (as a symbiotic entity).

• The range of new music is impossible to navigate.
• Music selection is driven by legal contracts (‘record deals’) that are constructed around outdated business models.
• No music selection is enabled outside of the contractual cocoon.
• The legacy cost structure perpetuates the model. Business as usual is almost a must.
• The price of music (any price) cuts out 50% of the market.
• On the plus side, music is promoted via radio. However, this is becoming less and less important. Find out why.

The score on a smartly-constructed & massively-promoted free music directory.

• The range of just-as-good new music (as good as artists on labels) is almost limitless.
• The navigation of (the ability to 'tune into') FILTERED new music is off-the-charts powerful and fun.
• Contractual arrangements are short, simple and attractive to artists.
• Music is available everywhere but terrestrial (linear) radio.
• The cost structure of this business is far less than the cost structure of labels and radio combined.
• Music is free if consumers want it.

A few notes…

• Could the entire thing be relatively ad-free and very profitable? I believe so.
• Jamendo is cool (if this site comes to mind), but they have a lot of wood to chop first. I don’t believe the Creative Commons license structure is going to do the trick for anyone building this.
• In five years most music will probably just stay in the cloud. The days of moving media to one’s hard drive are numbered.
• iLike, Last.FM and imeem have some of the components described here.
• TheSixtyOne is my favorite music site so far.

Watching the capacity crowd pouring enthusiasm (love and money) into the Nine Inch Nails show last week (not shown in the image above), reminds me once again that no artist should believe they need much more ‘enthusiasm’ than that.

The Known World...
Somebody also told me last week that there are 2,000 artists that generate at least $5,000,000 in revenue per year EACH ($10,000,000,000 combined annually). That number sounds a bit high, so even if we cut it by 50% ($2,500,000 each), the Known World is still a world that many artists would love to join. As of today, 99.99% of the artists in the Known World are still affiliated with a major label and most have probably obtained mass-market recognition through terrestrial radio.

The Unknown World…
The Unknown World is simply comprised of everyone else; they are the millions of relatively unknown, independent artists making over 1,000,000 songs a year. Some small percentage of these songs (far less than 10,000 - all languages/all genres?) is comprised of songs that are just as good as every song produced by Known World artists.

The Middle World…
This is the part of the industry that is referred to as the new ‘middle class’. In Lucas Gonze’s recent post “don’t know that band, nope”, he calls artists in this world “blockbuster microbands”. In this post, I’m just going to speculate that as the Known and Unknown worlds collide, Middle World artists will see a significant drop in music revenue.

Take me. Share me. Play me please…
It’s obvious to everyone, that there are millions of unknown artists with millions of songs standing on the sidelines screaming to get into the Known World; it’s always been this way. Now over the last 24 months, it’s become common practice by those that advise independent artists (including myself) to recommend some sort of free-song strategy; as a consequence, lots of artists are simply giving away music; presumably as part of a strategic solution to obtain entry into the Known World.

The Collision…
When ten thousand free, just-as-good songs (about 600 hours of listening time - created annually) find a mass-market of receptive (key word here) music consumers, the Unknown World is going to sponge up a lot of the ‘enthusiasm’ that fans previously allocated to Known World artists. It makes me wonder: with 600 hours of just-as-good, free music available, will music fans still buy music?

Causes of the collision…
For the collision to occur, two things have to happen (let me know if I am missing something). First, the ability to sift, sort and filter the needles out of the haystack has to reliably work (this is coming). But (second), just finding the just-as-good songs isn’t enough. Every song needs repetitive, mass-market exposure to generate the deep and broad imprinting that needs to occur to propel an artist into the Known World club.

The perfect disruptive business…
Here’s a quote from Fred Wilson’s presentation on disruption: “if you have a business that will shrink an existing market, allowing you to take $5.00 of revenue from a competitor for every $1.00 you earn, let’s talk!” The perfect disruptive business in this industry combines the following: free-sorted-sifted-just-as-good music coupled to repetitive mass-market exposure (for each song), combined with minimal overhead and zero legacy music industry legal friction.

I think it’s possible to create the business I just described, and this is the reason why I don’t get excited about businesses that intend to sell music (now yes, future doubtful). There are just too many artists with lots of just-as-good songs that deserve to be in the Known World club, and when you combine this fact with enabling technology and smart execution, you get truly disruptive businesses.

Reading Paul Lamere's blog on how EchoNest enables track-level recommendation, it occurred to me that as more and more artists give away music, and as the technology that enables music consumers to filter and find great free music becomes more and more refined, record labels (the current filters) deflate proportionately, as consumer mindshare will be siphoned off by the intersection of easy access to great (or good enough) and free.