January 31, 2010
“will be celebrating Australia Day with some gardening, a barbie, drinks & a swim with friends and tripleJ hottest 100 playing in background.”theother66, Twitter, January 25th
“They really f**ked it up this time. Can’t believe the effect that spoiling the Hottest 100 is having on youth around me.” Downesy, Twitter, January 22nd
“Did I mention that I am disappointed with the @triplej hottest 100? The top 10 especially offends me. And probably gave me herpes too.” Mversion, Twitter, January 26th
In 2010, the “world’s biggest music democracy”, Triple J’s Hottest 100, smashed all previous year’s efforts with an incredible level of listener engagement. More than 131,000 individuals cast 1.1 million votes for what its audience considered to be 2009’s hottest 100 tracks. Both the number of voters, and hence votes, were up 30 percent and 46 percent respectively.
Passive listening is one thing, but to vote and use the whole program as the basis for celebration on Australia Day – 4,100 Hottest 100 parties is not an apparition – is a testament to the public broadcaster and the eclectic tastes (and passions) of Triple J listeners.
Celebration and criticism of the final rankings aside, is the Hottest 100 more than just a gang-up of Muse and Art vs Science fans to game the results? Is the list a potential bellwether of illegal music consumption and the popularity of those tracks? What would a Darkest 100 look like?
Tracks in this year’s Triple J Hottest 100 accounted for more than 17 million illegal downloads in the past four weeks; that’s out of a total of more than 35 million in a ‘usual’ four week period. An impressive ‘market share’ for a public broadcaster!
While Mumford & Son’s Little Lion Man topped the Hottest 100, the track was ranked fourth in the illegal chart, with 698,528 downloads. The top spot in our Darkest 100 was taken by La Roux’s Bulletproof with 1.3m illegal downloads, up five places from its Hottest 100 ranking. By comparison, Hilltop Hoods’ Chase That Feeling came in third on both charts (760,312 downloads).
The tracks swinging wildly between their Hottest 100 spot and the illegal chart included Calvin Harris’ I’m Not Alone, ranked fifth in the illegal download chart (626,142 downloads) - a massive 54 places up on its popular vote (ranked 59 in the Hottest 100) - while Foo Fighter’s Wheels, ranked last by the Triple J audience, came in at number 12 in the Darkest 100 chart (452,583 downloads). Jet’s She’s A Genius jumped 62 spots, from 77 in the Hottest 100 to 15 in the illegal ranks (412,332 downloads).
The high profile results of Unearthed bands in the Hottest 100, however, weren’t exactly replicated on the Darkest 100. Art vs Science, coming in at number two on the Hottest 100, dropped 53 places on the illegal chart, accounting for just 75,048 downloads. Despite the drop, the band is still number one out of all the Unearthed bands when it came to downloads. Seth Sentry accounted for 66,880 downloads, a big drop of 29 places on the Darkest 100, Philadelphia Grand Jury accounted for 37,882 downloads (down 83 spots) while The Middle East had 24,737 downloads (down just 6 spots). Interestingly, Art vs Science’s Friend in the Field ranked 73 on both charts.
In terms of music type, the Darkest 100 is better suited to dance, rock and hip hop, while the indies were, to put it bluntly, murdered by the alternative chart. On average, indie tracks dropped 25 places on the illegal chart, while bands with more commercial radio play, tended to score higher positions on the Darkest 100.
The Hottest 100 is a testament to popular culture, a love of great music and a countdown, in more ways than one, of how modern Australia chooses to consume music.
Source: PeerIn-Big Champagne Australia 2010
November 29, 2009
For DMG Radio Australia, the culmination of new formats, a change in program personalities and news that Lachlan Murdoch’s private investment vehicle, Illyria, has taken a 50 percent stake in the group, seems analogous to someone hitting a massive reset button to re-boot the broadcaster.
For a company reporting annual revenues of A$100m, and earnings of around A$7m, each matter by itself is significant, but to see so much structural change occur within literally weeks must have management heads in Saunders St swooning with challenges and opportunities.
The material impact of these changes on the Australian radio market cannot be underestimated. It’s also tempting to consider the media fallout beyond the commercial radio market, with ripples spreading into online advertising and publishing relationships, but equally, this can be overstated.
Murdoch remains a non-executive board member of News Corp, and his personal relationship with local News Limited management is tight. As a former CEO of the publishing group, Murdoch was instrumental in the group’s investment in online media in the early to mid-1990s. His affinity with digital media is strong, and it is more than likely Murdoch will set a challenge for local DMG management to have online revenues equal the group’s broadcasting revenues within two to three years.
For DMG’s competitors, the doomsday scenario is to see the Nova and Vega networks develop some level of commercial collaboration with News Limited mastheads in each capital city. The possibility of a Nova-MySpace joint initiative shouldn’t be dismissed either. From Fairfax Media’s perspective, the Illyria-DMG Radio Australia deal will be problematic for both its print and radio businesses.
While Australia’s largest commercial radio network, Austereo, maintains a very strong lead on DMG across all audiences, the shake-up and revitalisation of DMG is an opportunity to recalibrate a number of factors, two of which include its management structure, following CEO Michael Anderson’s resignation this year, and the group’s priorities with regards to digital media.
In terms of online audiences for radio, Austereo is a clear number one, driven obviously by larger radio audiences, but equally by first-mover tactics to produce new digital brands like the highly recognisable RADAR station, and the soon-to-be released, Hot30 Jelly, which introduces near real-time listener programming.
Averaging close to 1m unique browsers a month, Austereo’s digital business captures an audience almost three times the size of DMG’s online channels. Yet with youth brands, particularly FMCG and restaurant groups, hungry (excuse the pun) for credible digital media options targeting a sub-18 market, this is not a situation DMG can afford to tolerate for much longer, certainly not under Murdoch’s watch.
Once the hand shaking and back-slapping are over, Murdoch will be busy pitching the new DMG and its vision to media buyers as a near perfect hybrid of mainstream and digital media reaching millions of young Australians, even when very few have no intention of purchasing a digital radio!
Illyria may have taken its time to lock down a substantial media asset, but given the growth potential for commercial radio overall, even Austereo would agree the purchase was astute.
November 9, 2009
There is something elegant about the theory that a digital entity, especially one based on networks and their associated dynamics, will obey, or at the very least, be susceptible to, the natural laws of science. Ergo, collapse under a dead weight, with nothing pressurising against external forces like costs, development and competition. In the case of Myspace, that “nothing” isn’t exactly true. There are still millions of accounts, the issue however is a growing percentage of dead profiles, not to mention the ever present issue of inaccurate account profile data that has made targeted advertising next to useless. As the ‘bounce rate’ indicates a site’s usefulness under certain search conditions, so the ‘echo rate’ predicates the social network’s usefulness and demise; a vast repository of accounts with no one home. A little preemptive? Well, that’s the point of social networks. They rise quickly, and collapse just as fast. This momentum affect of networks works to both its advantage and disadvantage. At the moment, the Myspace phenomenon is only sustained by lazy and unimaginative media buying groups. Once buyers run out of excuses in trying to explain the poor results of their $1m Myspace buy, the thing will commercially implode.
Curiously, the above estimates (source: Quantcast) of site traffic for Facebook (blue) and Myspace (green) suggest a type of zero-sum game, so that by April 2009 when the two networks crossed paths, they were set on on two divergent trajectories. The collapse of Myspace audience traffic (relatively speaking) is well documented, but what’s more interesting is the impending convergence of Facebook traffic growth with the steady decline in Yahoo.com site traffic (red). Based on this trend, the two sites are likely to converge around February 2010. Once ‘hit’ by the Facebook missile, is Yahoo.com likely follow the same downward spiral experienced by Myspace? There are clear differences in between two properties, but the one difference which clearly gave Yahoo its edge (i.e. 3x the site traffic of Facebook) is no longer sustainable. But we digress. Right now, brands need to clear the planet because Myspace is about to go Supernova.
October 19, 2009
“I’ve got Comes With Music for 12 months with my Nokia 5800… I’m not complaining about free music, but as soon as the 12 months is up I’ll go straight back to iTunes. Half of my songs download properly, then half of them don’t… .”, - scissormetimbers, Whirlpool Forum, June, 14th
From its release, Nokia’s Comes With Music (CWM) service has been an ambitious step by the handset manufacturer to develop unique customer services that diversify revenues as well as solidify customer loyalty to the brand.
In this sense, CWM has been designed as a ‘walled garden’; a virtual utopia of music choice, confined to particular handsets and particular software configurations.
But in the 12 months since CWM‘s UK launch, and its subsequent rollout across nine markets on four continents (including Australia), subscriber numbers have only reached 107,000 (23,000 in Australia since March 09).
A combination of telco resistance (because of their own music offerings), a poor user experience by some subscribers, as well as locking files to particular handsets, have all played their part in building resistance to the offering. (Did anyone miss the irony of a mobile player restricting the mobility of its music service?)
In recent Music Minds research, there was a wide level of scepticism to the idea of mobile phones becoming the primary portable music player. Device memory, battery power, interface design and menu navigation were all raised as practical concerns, let alone issues to do with data ownership, management and portability.
Even if the concept is generally applauded for its comprehensiveness, the music retail market is simply too competitive for any brand, even one like Nokia, to prosper without a seamless ‘plug and play’ platform.
In a market devoid of iTunes, CWM would have gone some way to differentiating certain Nokia handsets (vis a vis Samsung, LG and Motorola) and, more importantly, taken a reasonable slice of the music retail market. But iTunes has conditioned the market into accepting a certain pricing model, a certain way of selecting music and a certain technology experience. iTunes might not be the perfect model (for users or artists), but the market has determined it’s the best we have, and the perception of seeing every third person on a train or bus with white earplugs spinning their way through a music library, is a powerful endorsement of the technology.
In recent days Nokia has been hammered by a ‘told you so’ sentiment, primarily driven by advocates of DRM-free music and open platform technology. Now a new perception game starts to play out, this one more dangerous for Nokia. Where once CWM was seen as innovative, now the public’s perception will be more circumspect. Like the negative perception that smothered Microsoft’s Zune player, Nokia has to quickly change perception by changing the user experience.
September 27, 2009
The hacker culture is much maligned, often singled out as harbouring perpetrators of IT system break-ins. But a more accurate portrayal is a culture of learning, discovery and invention. Australian academic and author, McKenzie Wark, defined the ‘hack’ as “new information produced out of existing information.” In other words, taking a new perspective on current thinking.
Thus was born Music Hack Day in July this year, at the Guardian’s London offices. Hundreds of programmers, designers, artists and journalists were hot housed for a weekend, with the intention to create new tools and applications for accessing and manipulating music content.
Some of the stunning outputs created APIs to hack data hosted by Last.fm, SoundCloud, Google Maps, Song Kick and even the BBC itself (all with their blessing). The accessibility and transparency of the data enabled attendees to create music dating games, an iPhone app that visualises music and a music mapping system for global cities, including Sydney and Melbourne. In turn, the growth in applications further bolsters the publisher’s relevancy.
Other, more popular apps included software that automatically combines three tracks or more into a single remix, and the mobile phone app (developed via Google’s Android platform) which re-engineers the mobile phone into a musical instrument.
More recently, the Berlin Music Hack Day created music plug-ins for Wordpress, music-based viral games and mash-ups across numerous music sites. Again, the intention was to innovate and improve on existing data sets and music services, not to abuse the copyright of the content itself.
With more than 250 known music-related applications developed over 2008, Music Hack Day and the near-commercialisation of the hacking fraternity to encourage innovation across music consumption, will inevitably lead to the number of applications in 2009 dwarfing the previous year.
This innovation needs to be embraced by rights holders. New technologies, mash-ups and applications which tap into music services such as Last.fm, SoundCloud, and eventually, rights-friendly services such as Spotify, dramatically differentiate the legitimate channels from the pirates.
Access to data detailing demographics, geographies, music preferences, music history and even music purchases (the user’s meta-data) allows the hackers to mash these details with the music itself, creating a visual, more dynamic representation of an individual’s or community’s music profile.
Providing hackers with stem files, open platforms or unreleased material to remix and upload into systems not only encourages further remixing (2nd, 3rd generation music), but more importantly, exposes many more listeners to the original music (1st generation). This is the essence and value of an engaged hacking community - smart people developing new music distribution channels for new music audiences.
September 7, 2009
As local newspaper publishers play a dangerous game of brinkmanship to see who blinks first and introduces a premium-paid news service, there are some elegant parallels to the music industry and the plethora of streaming music services emerging both here in Australia and overseas.
All news groups have long toyed with the idea of charging for content, but it never became a priority (or even a necessity) until advertising forecasts in the last 12 months fell under the knife for some major reconstructive surgery. Advertising cycles are inevitable – peaks and troughs – but few have matched the severity of the most recent example. In Australia, like most industrial markets, what has spooked the majors, like News Limited, Fairfax Media and others, is the rapid decline in the value of online display advertising. Very few properties have held a premium.
In the specific case of News Corp, the company’s about-face on the pay-per-view model almost certainly started with the acquisition of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s general success in charging for content is seen as a proof-point, providing the content leviathan with some Dutch courage to publicly castigate Google and its “parasitic ways”.
In music land, the latest music whiz kid, Spotify, with its elegant user interface and unfaltering streaming technology, makes the simple point to customers: mediocrity is free (160Kbps), while quality (320 Kbps) will cost. This is exactly the point being made right across the media landscape. Yet, while quality is one unique selling proposition (USP), the other is exclusiveness, and this is far more challenging as a USP.
The sheer enormity of interest developing around Spotify, and as a consequence several other ‘alternative’ offerings (depending on jurisdiction), including Grooveshark, Pandora, Slacker, Last.fm, and locally, Bandit.fm, Guvera and the recently collapsed Stripe service, gives the impression that music streaming is an inevitable successor to downloads and CD sales, or at the very least, of becoming the pre-eminent channel for music consumption.
Apply a reality check to that assumption, and streaming as a mass-market channel for music consumption is about a practical as flying cars. Technically possible, and a few early adopters won’t necessarily throw up much evidence of a poor experience, but as penetration grows, and more than a few try the option, the experience of a subscription-based music stream will increasingly fail any cost-benefit analysis.
Putting aside for the moment the vagaries of mobile network coverage, with congestion and reception issues likely to affect a mobile-based streaming service, this leaves broadband as the alternative mass-market channel.
The issue here is that the bulk of computer time for the majority of people ticks over in the workplace. This is neither conducive to listener attention (for the purpose of valuing ad spots) or company bandwidth. As the number of listeners rises, even by small increments, the vast bulk of workplaces will block access to all music streaming sites. Alternatively, streaming at home might be a pleasurable and entertaining option for some, but these audience numbers, let alone subscribers, will be relatively small.
This quantum shift from the current per-per-unit model, where albums and singles carry a unit price, to a ‘music as water’ argument, where content is treated like a utility, is going to depend on a zero-sum game between advertising and subscriptions. If advertisers don’t follow, then expect subscription prices to compensate. But if advertising does propagate the stream, and dissect every third or forth track, how much is enough?
The research is conclusive – both here and more recently in the UK. For the vast majority, streaming is only one option, and a free one at that. In fact, for younger listeners, streams are increasingly just another source of downloads. As with YouTube clips, particularly the remixes unavailable elsewhere, the proliferation of stream ripping conversion tools that convert material into MP3s, will simply make streams another source of material rather than an end in themselves.
So here’s a prediction: paid subscriptions for online news won’t pay the bills, and neither will music streaming.
August 12, 2009
In the context of marketing and sales, the concept of ‘engagement’ carries increasing gravitas, and yet is still difficult to conceptualise through a single definition. Quantifying the blighter is harder still. The fascination with engagement stems from its potential to make-up for any shortfall in customer contact a brand may have in the areas of reach and frequency. What a brand fails to achieve in market share or regularity of contact (or feedback), the brand might compensate through share-of-mind. In the case of mobile phones, market share (unit sales) is dominated by the likes of Nokia and Samsung, with Blackberry and iPhone well behind. The put the quantity of sales into perspective, Samsung Australia sells approximately 3m units a year (second only to Nokia), compared with the 400,000 iPhones currently in operation in Australia (just under 4% of the market). Yet, in terms of digital chatter, comprising opinion, advice, questions and general consumer feedback, there is a massive discrepancy between brands, this time favouring Apple and Blackberry handsets. In short, what these brands lack in market share, they more than compensate for in terms of communities openly engaging in a dialogue, sometimes quiet passionately, about a mass-produced consumer item. The Sentiment Index graph below illustrates the scale of digital chatter between brands, with the iPhone alone having a 10-to-1 advantage against most competiting brands. By quantifying engagement in this manner, does this incentivise brand managers to do the cost-benefit of investing in an engagement strategy ahead of traditional reach and frequency filters? 
Source: Victrix Media
August 10, 2009
There is something very un-News Corp about this global steering committee to oversee, or to at least recommend, next steps towards the commercialisation of content. Where once the Sun King provided the autocratic guidance, now a coterie of editorial managers across the globe are collaborating in a workshop initiative. The company’s about-face on the preferred commercial model almost certainly started with the acquisition of the WSJ. The publication’s insistence on a pay-per-view model, and its general success as a proof-point, provided the content leviathan with some Dutch courage to publicly castigate Google and its parasitic ways. It certainly wasn’t the first shot fired in anger at the algorithm with a copyright blind-spot, but it was a particularly conspicuous comment to make. So while News Corp locks itself up behind the door marked “Special Projects, Scenario Planning”, the latest music whiz kid, Spotify, with its elegant UI and unfaltering streaming technology, makes the simple point to customers: mediocrity is free (160Kbps), while quality (320 Kbps) will cost. Likewise, it’s time for News Corp, or that other renowned first-mover, Fairfax Digital, to swallow the courage cookie, take a deep breath, and politely remind Google and every other freeloader of the same dictum. 
August 10, 2009
The clean, crisp lines demarcating the radio stations we listen to, or the television programs we watch on free-to-air, tend to blur and mutate the more our media behaviour migrates online. In other words, taking a screeching left off the autobahn, the viewer becomes immersed in a very dynamic, less predictable media-experience.
What compounds the issue of unpredictability, and at times confusion, is the lack of comprehensive data on comparative behaviour across websites. In other words, online media consumption is still overwhelmingly assessed by singular points of ‘engagement’ rather than in the context of the person’s repertoire of online publications and applications.
In the context of online music audiences, the plethora of music-related websites makes the measurement and understanding of engagement even more acute.
In Australia, our understanding, let alone analysis, of these online eco-systems, or repertoires, is very limited, despite having evolved through a combination of habit, relevancy and external promotion. We know, for example, that just over 390,000 Australians visit The Pirate Bay in a single month, and that about 226,000 will visit the Take40 website, but in the context of an online entertainment category with a reach of 9.4m Australians (source: Nielsen Online), where individuals spend on average three hours a month in the category, are these audience figures respectable, impressive or positively underwhelming?
Each month, Australians visit more than 450 entertainment-type websites, and this ignores the plethora of social media, sports and news sites which tend to leverage the entertainment dollar. Given this level of fragmentation, a monthly audience of almost a quarter of million visitors seems more than respectable.
In the US, understanding media relativities in a digital context is clearly more mature than what we commonly experience in Australia. A quick snapshot of Pandora listeners aged between 18 and 34, for example, throws up some fascinating site affinities.
While shared audiences between Last.fm, Radio Time, emusic and Limewire seem self-evident, there are also some strong audience relationships with the likes of Music of Faith, All Gospel Lyrics and the entertainment sites, Bet.com, VH1 and Hulu (Source: Quantcast).
For MTV.com viewers, again aged between 18 and 34, the online repertoire is a little more secular. Sites like Bossip, Skyrock, Atlantic Records, Perez Hilton and NY Mag are all regarded as having some of the highest affinity scores with the cable group’s online viewers.
Locally, the situation is made more complicated by the regular ‘leakage’ of many Australian music consumers to a number of high profile international sites. Perez Hilton pulls in approximately 320,000 local visitors each month, compared with 215,000 for the Huffington Post, and the 3.6m Australians who switch onto the emerging social media giant RockYou each month.
Understanding online music consumption, let alone the potential adoption of music-related applications and technologies, is near ineffectual without better understanding the market’s overall immersion in entertainment content and the predominantly international brands that have secured local engagement on a frequent basis.
August 1, 2009
With news of Kazaa ‘back from the dead’ and the Pirate Bay now a little more mercenary (how long before the name changes to Tariff Bay?), the world of music downloads has lost a few of its high profile superstars to perhaps a misguided strategy that file-sharers will change their spots when cash-for-content becomes the mantra.
Yet despite the best intentions to swing heavy music consumers towards a ‘all-you-can-eat’ subscription model, the world of P2P goes on, swallowing terabytes of data every hour like a deep space vortex, distributing ‘leaks’ at near light speed. Faced with such gravitational pull (and distribution efficiencies), an uneasy truce seems to have descended between parties in these so-called copyright wars.
While legal machinations seem to be giving way to technical monitoring options, there is a measurable rise in deliberate marketing tactics designed to take the sting out of ‘leaks’ through the seeding of free sample tracks, either directly into social media communities or via an established media partner.
Whether you conform to the ‘music is water’ theory, or uphold a solid, unerring position on copyright, the reality of local P2P music download activity holds a simple objective truth: it is pervasive, and involves the vast majority of consumers who regularly attend live music performances, or take an active interest in maintaining a music library of sorts. New, or rehashed payment models bolted onto P2P ‘brands’ will not alter this behaviour in any material way.
Right now almost 78m music tracks are downloaded across Australia each week, with the top track alone, usually a mainstream, high-rotation artist (Black Eyed Peas, for example), recording more than 500,000 downloads on a consistent basis, while a local hip hop group, like Hilltop Hoods (Chase That Feeling), which again has the backing of local radio, might record up to 188,000 downloads. By comparison, an indie group like British India (God is Dead, Meet the Kids), with a much lower rotation, records just over 9,000 downloads.
Of course, the correlation between airplay and downloads is not that clear cut., or even that strong.
Black Eyed Peas (Boom Boom Pow), for example, records 571,687 downloads concurrently with 271 spins for the week, which equates to 2,109 downloads per spin. By comparison, Taylor Swift (Love Story) reports 422,780 downloads concurrent with just 18 spins, or 23,487 downloads per spin.
Other artists with high download rates but low spins include: Chris Brown (Forever), 267,982 downloads with five spins; Rihana (Disturbia), 283,557 downloads with seven spins and Dizee Rascal (Dance With Me), 137,585 downloads with just five spins.
Clearly, with so much data on local P2P activity now coming to light, there is still much more to understand about what the download market can define in terms of niche music tastes and what insights they provide to justify this type of analysis becoming an accurate barometer to music trends and, more importantly, emerging stars.
