Bruce Warila | Sun, June 8, 2008 at 06:45 AM The celestial funnel will end the ability and the need to promote undiscovered artists and songs.
Promotion, Disruptive Technology, Business Advice For Artists, Alternative Music Marketing, Music Information Retrieval The Celestial Jukebox
Perhaps you’ve heard about the “Celestial Jukebox”? It’s the notion that anyone, anywhere will be able to listen to a continual and personalized stream of digital music through devices and computers connected to the Internet. By the end of 2008, the Celestial Jukebox will have just about arrived.
The Celestial Jukebox is great news for artists. The technology that powers the Celestial Jukebox will recommend you and your songs to those seeking your style of music. The same technology will ultimately generate royalties and opportunities from sources you could only dream about three years ago.
To succeed in the Celestial Jukebox, make it though the Celestial Funnel.
Before you make any money from the Celestial Jukebox, your songs will have to make it through the Celestial Funnel. The Celestial Funnel is the widespread availability of, and the pervasive and coordinated reliance upon Same Sonic Science, Social Validation, Big Brother Systems, and upon Trusted Curators (all explained below).
The Celestial Funnel is the Music 2.0 phenomenon artists have been waiting for, and it’s the absence of it, that made Music 2.0 the bitch you didn’t expect. Digital music was supposed to change everything. Instead, it ushered in an unprecedented tidal wave of crap competition and clutter that’s unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. The Celestial Funnel is game changing; it cuts out the chafe, eliminates the clutter, and it enables great artists and songs to be found…rather effortlessly.
Who will use the Celestial Funnel?
Eventually everyone. However, since most people still find out about music the old fashioned ways, all of the gatekeepers that make and break artists, such as record labels, programming directors, music supervisors, booking agents and anyone with gravity in the music industry, will use the Celestial Funnel to find the best songs and artists.
The Celestial Funnel will end music promotion, as you know it today.
By 2012, pre-popularity promotion will cease to be effective. Prior to participating in any music related opportunity that’s bigger than a backyard barbeque, you and/or your songs will have to make it through the Celestial Funnel. Artists should take note: no amount of indie promotion will take you or your songs through the funnel faster. As the Celestial Funnel envelops the marketplace, you will no longer be able to put lipstick on the proverbial pig.
Why will the Celestial Funnel work?
My job is to understand the depth and capabilities of the new technologies and services that are being built for the music industry. I can tell you that the technology that I am about to describe works well, and that it’s only getting better. Second, and more importantly, the technology doesn’t have to work perfectly; it only has to cut the size of the haystack by 80% to enable those that need to find the needles…a simpler and less-labor intensive way to find them. The people that are charged with sifting through mounds of songs and piles of artist profiles will readily embrace this timesaving technology.
Stages of the funnel. Stage One - Same Sonic Science
Same Sonic Science, also known as Music Information Retrieval, includes software and services that can:
- Recommend songs that truly sound like another song (the seed song).
- Funnel out songs that do not have the attributes that a listener is seeking.
- Measure a songs proximity to a cluster(s) of songs.
- Measure potential popularity (by counting charting-songs or by any subjective criteria) of songs in a cluster.
- And, many other related propositions via database design and user interfaces.
There’s no danger that Same Sonic Science will cause every song to sound the same. Any song is a jumping off point for seeking sameness. This technology works, it will cut out huge buckets of bad, and it’s being glued into every single digital music proposition on earth.
Stages of the funnel. Stage Two - Social Validation
Moving down the funnel, the next stage is Social Validation; it’s the first stage of the funnel that enables humans to correct the inaccuracies of, or the inconsistencies within, the Same Sonic Science. Social Validation is what happens after someone pushes the Same Sonic Button on a digital music site, or within a digital music system. It’s the next thing(s) people do after listening. In no specific order, they bookmark, they add to a playlist, they share, they recommend, they tag, they buy, they vote, they download, they steal, they play again, they leave a comment, or they basically do anything that causes an information system to record a positive or negative event. The data that’s generated from social validation will be observable everywhere.
Stages of the funnel. Stage Three - Big Brother Systems
The next stage of the funnel is the use of systems that combine Same Sonic Science with as much Social Validation data that can be collected. Huge pools of song consumption/activity data are accumulating across the Internet and elsewhere. It’s now possible to monitor the world for songs that are bubbling under the radar in every niche. It’s also possible to identify emerging trends and new niche genres. Right now, there are a few gatekeepers that are preparing to act upon this data. In the near future, every professional in the music industry will use this data to some extent. Within five years, presentations of this data, through stunning user interfaces, will be available to everyone.
Stages of the funnel. Stage Four - Trusted Curators
Stages one, two, and three of the funnel, will eliminate 80% to 90% of the songs entering the funnel each year. However, the funnel keeps getting bigger. New songs mingle with old songs, and there are still too many songs for the average consumer to listen to. Trusted Curators (refernce) are those that know how to extract the gems from the bottom of the funnel, and consumers will still rely upon these people to make recommendations. Trusted Curators are record labels (still), programming directors, music bloggers, music supervisors, talent buyers, booking agents, others, and my favorite: artists that brand together to build a brand on the Internet.
Funnel Strategies For Artists - 2010 and onward.
There will be no fooling the funnel. There are too many sites and systems, and everything can be crosschecked and correlated. Don’t waste your time buying plays or trying to find ways to game the funnel. Eventually, you will be exposed as a fraud.
Hedge your bets and create a mutual fund for songs. If you have some business sense and if you are skilled at promotion, become a Trusted Curator. Pull numerous artists into a unified brand where everyone involved shares in some of the upside.
If I were an aspiring artist today, I wouldn’t spend much effort on promotion (single artist no, multi-artist brand yes). I would wait for the funnel to evolve. Your songs are going to settle into their natural place in the funnel regardless of how much or little noise you make about yourself.
Stop editing your own work. Find a great producer / engineer to help you make the best songs possible. Make lots of songs, and seek every bit of rip-it-apart, put-it-back-together feedback as possible.
Absolutely wipe the following thought from your brain: “If I could get a record deal and get my songs into heavy rotation on FM radio, everyone would love me.” That’s never going to happen. Record labels will be the biggest users of the funnel; especially Stage Three (Big Brother Analysis). It’s all going to be about song quality (finally). You can’t promote your way to a “deal”. Make songs, obtain super critical feedback, fix and repair songs, repeat process; this is your best option.
Prior to becoming reasonably popular, putting numerous, iteratively improved and produced songs into the Celestial Funnel will generate more career progress than going on tour. In my opinion, you are better off working the best day job you can find, and then investing in professional help to make your songs better (versus touring as an unknown).
How do I put songs into the funnel?
Make sure you have a Free Song Strategy and a Digital Manager (a human) that seeks the most efficient way to manage your presence on anything and everything on the Internet. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to create profiles and to continually load songs into everything on the Internet, but you have to do it for now.
- TuneCore can help you move your songs around, but TuneCore’s reach is limited.
- ArtistData can help you move your data around, but not your songs.
- ReverbNation and TuneCore can help you monitor progress.
- All three of the propositions above need to be combined.
It’s early days for the funnel. 2008 is barely year one of the Celestial Funnel. It will take several years for everyone to fully adopt most of this technology. By 2011, fresh songs will take a year (one million new songs a year) to succeed or fail. I have nothing to base this upon; it's just my estimate.
A word of caution…
I am always ahead of my time. If you are 2/3 into your plan for success, you may want to ignore me and continue. If you are just starting out, hit print and read again…
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Reader Comments (20)
Bruce,
I have been waiting for about two years now to hear something like this!
I will not claim that my own music is quality enough at this time to make it through the funnel...But, this is exactly the kind of system I have dreamed of.
The most redundant comment I make when commenting on the music environment is:
"Obscurity is an artists biggest enemy" or something about how saturated the market/industry is.
This Celestial Funnel is the way to break through that saturated environment and beat the beast of obscurity...If your music makes the grade (rather than if your promotion machine has a bigger budget than "Artist X")!
I look forward to the implementation of this funnel...Now I just have to make some worthy music!
Keep up the good work!
Milton
you continue to amaze me Bruce....i await everyone of your blogs and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that when you put something it out it will be way beyond 'quality' and into the amazing hemisphere. This thinking is best in class...literally incredible.
Andy
Dear Bruce!
This sounds too good to be true. In fact, it is what we have been waiting for since we started in 1985 as indie artist.Although we are full - time independent artists since decades, I have the feeling that something will change. It is good to be prepared and to focus on the options that will help us grow in the future. Besides our cds we have created a huge amount of production music. Our publisher shares the music freely all over the word and we get revenue from broadcasting and licensing. In that field we are experiencing already how tracks make their way without promotional effort on our side. Each song has it's own destiny once it's published. And it is unpredictable which tracks make it big.
Sorry Bruce - love you to bits, but this is just nonsense.
You've painted a vision of a totalising utopian meritocracy that will encapsulate and subsume all music distribution, promotion and consumption. It's a fictional land in which everything about how we currently engage with music will be made redundant, and we will instead inhabit a brave new world where all music will be rewarded on how inherently 'good' it is.
We're never going to agree on this - but for the record, I'll say it again: please stop fortune-telling. This is fairytale stuff. It sounds lovely - but it's imaginary.
There IS no magical solve-everything machine. The complexity and change we've been seeing - that's not going to suddenly resolve into a singular system to which all people will subscribe. People are not neat and tidy entities - and nor is their music consumption.
Am I the only one who thinks that this sort of complexity is not a problem to be solved?
Oh - and PLEASE don't suggest that musicians put all of their promotion on hold on the promise that soon everything will be delivered by digital unicorn. It's not helpful.
Sorry to come across as really negative, but nothing makes me cross faster than Music Futurism - especially when it's of the order of 'One day we will all wear silver jumpsuits, eat meals in a pill and fly around with jetpacks.'
I'd expect this of Gerd Leonhard - but you're far smarter than this.
Andrew,
I would not describe it...unless I could build it.
-Bruce
No you can't. It requires mass social engineering. We're talking Cultural Revolution stuff.
I'm not saying the technology wouldn't be up to the task - but you're talking about not only radically changing the way in which people consume music on an individual basis, but about tearing down existing musical cultures and rewriting from a clean slate.
All that remains is to stand atop a building and exclaim 'Nothing can stop me now!!!!'.
Would you like to borrow my cape? :)
Yes, now we are in agreement. As I said, this will all take a while, but it's game changing. Have you ever seen me in a cape?
Wow you guys.
I can understand how Andrew would feel the way he does about this...but his take seems as stuborn as Bruce's does optimistic.
Is it really so hard to imagine such a system actually working? Is it too lofty of a goal?
Maybe it can and will work for the musicians and the industry heads?
Maybe not so much for the basic consumer but maybe as the self described "funnel" that directs the flow of music to the consumer?
I can understand how the average music purchaser would not bother with the details of such a system but it seems completely realistic that the system could be the filter that is in place prior to the mass exposure on the various music networks?
Sure there will always be garage bands out there and basement DJ's but maybe this "funnel" idea is the filter they can all aspire to pass through (in lieu of the "record deal" system previously sought after)?
You two (Bruce & Andrew) should work together to make this thing a real possibility(???)
I think the 'celestial funnel' is a useful conceptual framework, and the principle has always been in place; the music we are exposed to comes to us through filters. The filters are changing, and moving closer to those who consume.
However, I disagree that "Your songs are going to settle into their natural place in the funnel regardless of how much or little noise you make about yourself."
No matter what meritocratic system is in place, how you market yourself will be critical. If you take two artists of equal talent with equally good songs (whatever that means), they will almost never achieve the same levels of popularity in any system - even if they follow the same promotional tack. There are too many variables involved - creating good music is never enough to make a breakthrough. Creating exceptional music might be - but that's extremely rare.
Dan, I would agree with your disagree if the Same Sonic Science stuff didn't work so well. An artist will not be able to promote a song out of the box it belongs in. For example, if someone is looking for hot broken glass (metaphor), that's what they are looking for (period). And, it works the other way around. If an artist has created a song that sounds like hot broken glass, they can't promote their way into cool blue water. Hope that helps..
Bruce,
Do you have any external links you could post that might help support this concept of yours? Any network or program that is maybe seeding this idea?
I happen to think this "Utopian ideal" of a celestial funnel is a fantastic idea...but it would be helpful to have an idea of just where the starting point is for this.
Is there anyone or any company out there trying to put this in place currently? If not, then where do you think it will begin?
After all, we do not want the "talk is cheap" monster lurking behind us waiting to kill such an interesting concept!
*sigh of relief* @ Dubber casting the first stone.
"Digital unicorn" now that's a lot of lols.
That's not to say I don't appreciate the thought that goes into this valuable work here, Bruce.
BUT first thought I got was a distinctly dubberesque "it's complex" which is no surprise because it was the only thing I learned at AUT anyway.
but MY thoughts were: Y'know - selling the value in music isn't just based around the actual music.
And again I call elitism. If mum and the kids want to sing for grandma on webcam and Paris Hilton wants to put out an album I don't care if it's part of a "wave of crap" where is the value being created?
Where is "chocolate rain" in the funnel?
Where's her best friends cute older brother with cool hair who plays bass in the funnel?
Where is the sex appeal in the funnel?
Can the funnel tell if Duffy is hot?
But data's your thing Bruce and there's no doubt it will have a bigger part to play - and perhaps more so amongst the more discerning. But it could never be as ubiquitous as you describe. And not by 2010.
There was a time when man could not fly. And everybody who said it will be possible was attacked or laughed at. Why?
I can't predict how everything will work out, but the technology seems to be there to make it happen. It would be the best thing for artist and music lovers.
But to me it seems that some people would be unhappy if that scenario became real. Is it because they know that they are a dying species?
Here's an update/continuation to this post on Music Think Tank.
You have a great sense of humor.
I have to agree with Andrew (probably the first time too, much to my surprise): this is, at best, science fiction. At worst, it is a technocratic cry of hope that technology will somehow solve a problem that technology has created.
Let me make a point, that I think is being missed here: what people listen to has often very little to do with musical quality. People listen to music they know, they listen to music they think makes them seem cool, they listen to the music all their friends listen to and sometimes they even listen to music that is any good.
Notice the first stage of your funnel. The technology is already here. What does it do? It shows how close a song is to another song, with the hidden assumption that if something sounds like a known hit, it's also likely to be a hit. What does that tell us? That imitation is a good thing. Will that help us get better music? Perhaps, but it's a long shot. Since economics is a more likely criterion than quality and the songs are likely to be reviewed primarily in relation to recent successes, a probable result is that the technology will filter out much of the music and leave Britney Spears.
Social validation was, is and probably will still be prone to manipulation by the big players. Quality doesn't matter, but the fact that the guys in your class think you're a geek and the girl of your dreams thinks you're square does. Unless you're a die-hard music fan, your tastes are much more likely to be shaped by peer pressure than the actual quality of the hits of the day (most of which are pure bubblegum). Musical peer pressure isn't something that happens spontaneously - most often it's a result of marketing that goes far beyond selling records. Who do you think is going to get more spins: the talented musician or the girl who can't sing, who appears in all the colour magazines? I know for a fact that it's going to be the one whom everyone knows.
The last two points boil down to one thing: the big players are going to get even bigger. Frankly, I see nothing to jump for joy in the vision that in a while I will be unable to achieve any level of success without the backing of a major label. Not all Trusted Curators weigh the same. How many people read your blog, do you think? How many are subject (and susceptible) to major-label marketing and big media promotional policies? I rest my case.
To sum up: I think you should seriously reconsider this idea you have of a technological rainbow just around the corner (which rears its ugly head in various guises now and again in your writing). The problem with spending too much time on the Internet is that people start to think of nothing else. I'll bet you a crate of beer that in four years time the realities of music marketing and consumption will not have changed radically. The people who have the big marketing budgets will still sell the most records. And most of the big-selling music will still be crap.
And remember what I once wrote about five-year plans. ;)
(Oh, by the way - I couldn't help but snigger at reading that "The technology that powers the Celestial Jukebox will recommend you and your songs to those seeking your style of music." since I'm at present engaged in trying to make Last.fm recommend my music to people who listen to rock, not electro. The reason's simple, but I do not want to go into detail here.)
Krzysztof, you should know me well enough by now. I write for the feedback and I shape what I do, and how I do it, accordingly. The great thing about blogging is: if you say something partly interesting, people come to your site and teach you. That's far better than calling people on the phone and far better than hunting around for the feedback you need.
You can probably guess that I am working on a bunch of the things I described here. You can bet that I will temper what I call it, and what I claim it can do, from the feedback I get from guys like you and Andrew.
You don't have to win the bet to get the beer from me. When we meet sometime, I'm buying.
Thanks for commenting on my blog (so often).
-Bruce
Bruce, thanks for a great topic! I'm a professional musician, but still learning the ropes regarding "making it big" in the music world. Over the last month, this discussion has been loaded with thoughtful insights that have helped me to see what's on the minds of our thought leaders. In the end, I'm sure the future will show a Hybrid of the optimistic and pessimistic sides of this discussion. Four years from now, some good bands will be able to credit their break-through to some version of this celestial funnel, while the market continues to remain oversaturated with bad music that is promoted very well.
Thanks again and let's have a beer soon!
Brian
Interesting, well thought out, articulate...and pure fantasy.
Ben,
When you say something like "pure fantasy", I am usually looking for details and knowledge that supports your claim. Thanks for the comment, but please leave more of an argument next time.
Cheers,
Bruce