Fortunes sink for LimeWire, Walkman

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#5)

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

Rest in peace, LimeWire and Walkman (Japan). Happy Birthday, iPod!

Yep, it’s been quite a week. A giant of file-sharing software bites the dust while an iconic music player of an earlier age limps toward its eventual demise. Meanwhile, the iconic music player of today celebrates its ninth birthday.

On Tuesday, LimeWire officially died. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood handed LimeWire’s parent, the Lime Group, a permanent injunction ordering the company to halt its distribution and support of its file-sharing unit. The company, embroiled in a copyright infringement lawsuit with the Recording Industry Association of America since 2006, complied with the judge’s order, ending an era which saw LimeWare at one time sharing space on nearly one out of every three iPods.

Read about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/technology/27limewire.html

Just two days earlier, on Sunday, Japanese electronics giant Sony confirmed it would stop producing its Walkman cassette players in Japan, due to declining demand, although it would continue to make the devices in China for the U.S. and European markets. 

You can read more about the Walkman's declining fortunes here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101025/tc_yblog_upshot/sony-walkman-rip

News of the end of the Japan-based Walkman came as Apple’s iPod marked its ninth birthday, following the trail the Walkman had blazed for it years earlier, by showing people that they could incorporate portable music into any lifestyle.

Details follow here: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/apple-ipod-is-9-years-old-50001302/

Like the Byrds sang, to everything there is a season ….

(Listen to the Byrds’s classic 1960s rendition of their hit, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with words adapted from the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes and music by Pete Seeger, here:)

Let’s start with LimeWire. The seeds of its destruction were sown four years ago when the privately owned company and its founder, Mark Gorton, clashed in court with the RIAA. In May, Lime Group was found liable of copyright infringement;

the injunction, issued by the U.S. District Court in New York, forces Lime Group to disable LimeWire's searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and distribution features, effective immediately. A hearing to determine damages is set for January.

Lime Group, however, is working on a new piece of software that the company promises will adhere to copyright laws, a move aimed at jumping on the burgeoning market for legal downloads and radio-style services. The new service will include a desktop media player, mobile apps and a catalog of music from which people can stream and download songs, the Associated Press reported.

What did a typical Walkman user look like, back in the day? In the '80s, my friend, June Wilson, a wonderful artist from Middletown, N.J., painted this portrait, called "Walkman," which should answer that question:

A TYPICAL WALKMAN USER, BACK IN THE DAY

Note the oblivious countenance, a forerunner to the iPod user of today. No wonder the Walkman, which emerged in 1979, sparked a genuine revolution. "It started to push this idea of mobility," said Nick Bilton, a New York Times technology reporter. "You couldn't really walk around or sit on a subway with a record player and listen to music. You could with a Walkman."

Before the Walkman, "the music industry was essentially an industry being listened to at home," said Bilton. But once the Walkman was introduced, cassette sales "just skyrocketed during that time. It was a huge thing for the industry," Bilton said. Sony has sold more than 200 million Walkmans since the device first went on sale.

Considered by some to be the most significant music invention of the past 50 years, the Walkman was the brainchild of Nobutoshi Kihara, an engineer in the audio division at Sony. Kihara was asked by his chairman, Akio Morita, to design a device that would allow Morita to pass the time on business trips by listening to his favourite operas.

(Speaking of opera, here is a clip of The Three Tenors - the Spanish singers Plácido Domingo and José Carreras and the Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti - performing "La donna è mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto, in 1994:)

As the Walkman shuffles off into gadget history, let's pay tribute to it in pictures:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5733286/Sony-Walkman-in-pictures.html

Now let's talk about the iPod’s birthday.

Like the Walkman two decades earlier, the iPod revolutionized music, helping to bring the idea of digital technology - and the Internet - into the mainstream. It wasn't the first MP3 player, but the iPod and its iTunes website made collecting and listening to digital music easy. The success of the iPod also made a star of Apple chief Steve Jobs, and made Apple a corporate juggernaut.

Watch Jobs' mesmerizing introduction of the iPod in 2001, here:

This is a good point to introduce this week’s Open Mike interview: Kevin Brennan, of Bradley Beach, N.J., is a music fan and musician whose personal digital-music collection contains about 130,000 tracks. He has been through vinyl, cassette, Walkmans, minidiscs, iPods, streaming, the whole ball of wax.

“I’ve been building that collection for over 10 years,” Kevin told me. How much time does he spend on his collection? “Usually it goes in spurts,” he said. The library covers "a very wide range" of music, "anything from Amadeus (Mozart) to ZZ Top."

(Go here to watch an abbreviated but stirring performance of  the first movement of Amadeus Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony by the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra:)

(To view a clip of ZZ Top performing "Sharp Dressed Man" in concert, check this out:)

Kevin started out owning vinyl records. "And as soon as CDs came in vogue in the mid-'80s, it didn't make any sense to store your music on such a big, bulky medium, and the CDs were very convenient," he said. "But now with the advent of music being digitized, what once took an entire wall of CD cases jewel boxes now can be contained in one hard drive that you can contain in the palm of your hand.”

He stores the music in "several external hard drives," backing up everything to one hard drive. The backup drive is "left dormant in case I have hardware failure," he said, adding that he has "about another 180 gigabytes of free space, so it’s almost time to buy another drive."

Along the way, there have been mishaps, he said. "One time," he recalled, "I lost an entire drive of video that I had brought over from my TiVo; they were all live concerts that had been broadcast on television and I lost probably 300 hours of really good stuff."

Kevin listens to his tracks using various media. He spends long hours in his day job, driving a truck For the truck, he has "a stereo that my iPod is interfaced to." In addition to the iPod there’s "a USB input so I can just listen to music just on a flash key. At home or in my office on the computer I try to use Lennox (MP3 player) ... usually the player that came with the operating system. On Windows I use Winamp and on the Mac I use iTunes."

I asked Kevin if he thinks that flattening sales of digital music downloads in the past few years signal that people are tiring of music downloads. His reply: "I don’t think they’re tired of downloading music, I think they’re tired of downloading music and having to pay for it." With free music available through illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, "people are sharing the files," he said. "One person buys the files; they rip it and it gets shared amongst thousands."

The increasing availability of legal, radio-type subscription services could be contributing to the sliding sales, he said. "I myself subscribe to Rhapsody. And for $10 a month, you can listen to unlimited tracks in their library, and they have 7 million tracks. So there’s really no reason to buy the music if you are connected to the Net. On demand you can listen to whatever you want. Why store it yourself when it’s available there for you to listen to?"

In the months and years to come, reducing storage will be the big issue, Kevin said.

"There will come less and less of a need for people to amass and store the files themselves .... There’s no necessity for having all the storage and maintaining all the infrastructure and the computing power to have everybody duplicate what’s out there in one source. ...There’s no need for you to keep it yourself."

To hear the complete interview, go here: http://www.box.net/files/0/f/52605102/1/f_516848666#/files/0/f/52605102/1/f_529638477

Since Kevin mentioned country music and we haven't yet featured that genre in this blog, let's close out with a couple of fine renditions of "Miles and Miles of Texas" and "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" by the venerable Western swing band, Asleep at the Wheel. For this music, we can thank an amateur video photographer who caught the band in action when it played a record store in Austin, Texas.

Glee-full labels gain as Beatles' record falls

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#4)

Got Glee?

The Emmy-winning musical comedy-drama TV series that airs on the Fox network has become a juggernaut – not just of the small screen, but of the digital-music industry.

Glee, which will next air Oct. 26, has had 75 singles appear on the Billboard Hot 100 chart – smashing, in a mere 16 months, a record that has stood for 40 years, for most chart appearances by a group; a record held by the Beatles, only the most influential rock band of all time. And with weeks still to go in the current season and the show already picked up for a third season, the Glee ensemble potentially could shatter Elvis Presley’s all-time record of 108 chart appearances.

One of the breakout hits of fall 2009, Glee focuses on the misfits who make up a high-school glee club. It has been called A 'High School Musical' with bite.

(Meet the cast of Glee, here:)

The Glee phenomenon is part and parcel of the digital age. The public’s growing disaffection for CDs in the digital age has hammered revenue at major music labels. But fans apparently can't get enough of Glee: they watch the show, buy the downloads of its songs (more than 11.5 million as of this month, according to Billboard), and go to its cast members' concerts.

Consequently, Glee has the power to boost or re-energize the careers of the artists whose music it features. The week after Glee dedicated an episode to the music of Madonna, the show’s soundtrack debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 chart. The show also boosted sales of Madonna’s new concert CD, released a week before, and pushed her greatest-hits album, Celebration, released in 2009, back onto the chart, checking in at number 86.

(Listen to the cast of Glee performing Madonna's "Open Your Heart," here:)





(Watch the Material Girl herself performing "Open Your Heart," from her 1986 video, here:)

Britney Spears' album sales experienced a similar boost in September. Spears' latest release, November 2009's "The Singles Collection," re-entered the Billboard Top 200 album chart after her appearance on Glee.

Such chart-busting prowess hasn’t been seen since the heyday of Beatlemania in the 1960s. During the week of April 4, 1964 – two months after the Fab Four arrived in the U.S. – the Beatles held 12 positions on the Billboard Hot 100, including the top five positions. Those feats remain unmatched; although Glee, which comes out with about seven songs per episode, has the potential to break even that mark, IBIS World analyst Kathleen Ripley told me.

(See the Beatles performing “I Saw Her Standing There” at Washington Coliseum during that first U.S. visit, here:)

(The Beatles, incidentally, are among the few major artists whose recorded catalogue is not available through online music services such as iTunes. Negotations between the band, EMI and iTunes owner Apple Inc. have stalled, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney said in November 2008. "We are very for it, we’ve been pushing it," McCartney said. “But there are a couple of sticking points … They [EMI] want something we’re not prepared to give them.”)

The Glee phenomenon underscores how television shows like this and American Idol are giving the beleaguered music industry a much-needed boost in the digital age. Over the five years to 2010, revenue at major labels fell an estimated 9.7% annually, while TV deal-related revenue surged 15.3%, IBIS World reported.

In 2010, the television production and television broadcasting industries will earn 5.5% of their revenue from music-related content, with the fastest growth coming from prime-time music-focused shows such as American Idol and Glee, IBIS World said. Musical television is expected to garner $1.7 billion in production revenue this year and is anticipated to grow at an annualized rate of 5.8% over the five years to 2015 to $2.2 billion. This is significant growth considering that the television production industry as a whole is expected to increase at an average annual rate of 3.3% during this time to total $36.2 billion in 2015.

IBIS World's Ripley calls Glee's ability to surpass the Beatles' mark after just 16 months in existence on TV "astonishing and astounding."

"I wouldn’t be surprised if (Glee) broke the No.1 record for that Hot 100 appearances held by Elvis Presley," Kathleen told me from Santa Monica, Calif., noting that Glee still has the rest of this season and all of its coming season to topple Elvis' record.

(Check out Elvis performing "Ready Teddy," on the Ed Sullivan Show, in 1956, here:)





The analyst noted that Sony, which has licensing rights to American Idol through 2010, has teamed up with News Corp.'s Fox as Glee’s record label. Under the agreement, Sony has the release-rights to all digital and physical music from the show; the first rights to recording contracts with the show’s cast; and a percentage of sales from merchandising, endorsements, ringtones and live shows.

The agreement will give “fans of the music on the TV show the opportunity to have that instant download, to have that instant satisfaction of being able to listen over and over again to these great songs performed by current television stars,” Kathleen said. 

I'm going to let the cast of Glee close things out this week with their upbeat cover of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin.'" Listen to it, here:

Are downloads losing luster with buyers?

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#3)

Can it be true? Are people already tiring of music downloads?

If you believe Matt Rosoff, yes.

Rosoff, an analyst for the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, told a podcast audience early this month that a change in listening habits in just the past several months has caused speculation that people are ready to shift from downloads services such as industry colossus iTunes to more of a radio-type streaming service such as Pandora or Rhapsody.

“A lot of people were used to buying music for a long time," Rosoff opined. "Everybody had their record collections and then their CD collections, and so it was an easy transition when the first commercial digital music services came out.

"And I think about two or three years ago, people started to realize that I’ve got 3,000 or 4,000 songs, but I am kind of sick of arranging them into playlists," Rosoff said. "I am kind of sick of going through my collection and figuring out what I am going to listen to, and there was almost this shift: wouldn't it be nice if somebody else could drive for me?"

Rosoff pointed out on the TechFlash podcast that Apple Inc. tried to capitalize on the change in music-consumption habits without undercutting its business model, by coming out with Genius, which constructs playlists around particular songs in a user's iTunes library. “But I think people are increasingly discovering more radio-type services,” he said. Rhapsody, Rosoff pointed out, was on the scene in the beginning, but "a ton of new competitors have popped up in the last six months," including Mog radio (http://www.mog.com), and Rdio (http://www.rdio.com), created by the founders of Internet phone service Skype, and Spotify (http://www.spotify.com/int/about/what/).

“It seems that there’s a lot of buzz around the idea that instead of buying individual downloads, you’re going to subscribe or you’re going to pay a monthly fee and you’re going to get whatever you want, whenever you want," Rosoff said. "The trick is making sure that that works on all sorts of devices.”

(Read a review of Mog and Rdio here: http://www.masslive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2010/08/review_rdio_mog_music_service_comparison.html)

(Listen to Rosoff's full comments at: http://icestream.bonnint.net/seattle/kiro/2010/10/p_TechFlash_20101001_1pm.mp3)

The watershed moment in the history of music downloads was Jan. 9, 2001 - Apple's introduction of iTunes, its digital media-player application, used for playing and organizing digital music and video files, and for managing content on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. iTunes is a brilliantly conceived system in that one can connect to the iTunes Store through the Web to buy and download a range of media, from music to movies to apps. It is also used to download applications for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Rosoff’s comments reflect the flattening of digital-music sales in recent years. Early this month, Neilsen Research reported that U.S. digital music-track purchases for the first six months of 2010 totaled 630 million, flat with the year-ago figure. Sales began to slow significantly after jumping 28% in 2007-2008. In 2008-2009, sales posted a considerably smaller increase of 13%.

Nielsen Research analyst Jean Littolff blames the sagging sales on weak consumer confidence, weak release schedules and confusion over the many choices people have to buy music online. Although the stagnant condition is a “plateau,” it “doesn’t mean that this digital consumption is going to drop significantly,” Littolff said. “It’s a plateau, but it’s not yet saturation.” (Read the full report at:

http://www.internetfinancialnews.com/financialblogtalk/news/ifn-6-20101001USDigitalMusicSalesGoFlat.html)

The slowing downloads sales, combined with the growing appetite for radio-style streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, are driving interest in online in-car audio, according to data from Vision Critical. An online survey of more than 4,000 consumers in the United States, Britain and Canada found that one in four drivers regularly play personal digital music through their car stereo system. Broadcast radio is still the dominant source of audio in the car, the survey showed.

(Read the survey here: http://www.rbr.com/media-news/internet/28202.html. See more on this topic at:

http://www.rbr.com/radio/28218.html)

This seems like a good moment to introduce this week’s Open Mike interview. I talked with Ed Long, the music director of Trenton, N.J., radio station WIMG-AM 1300. WIMG is a traditional, brick-and-mortar broadcaster whose mission is the “appreciation of black gospel music as an art form.” The station targets primarily an African-American market in western and central New Jersey and the suburbs of Philadelphia. It has an audience of about 500,000, and an Internet presence at http://www.wimg1300.com.

I asked Ed to predict the next big technological change in radio music. His answer speaks to the declining enthusiasm for downloads and the embrace of radio-type streaming systems:

“CD players will be gone," he told me. "I think it will be a improvement of the MP3 quality audio, that it doesn’t take up as much space; WAV files take up a lot of space. I think there will be a way that you can save you file and it will be very good quality, but it won’t take up a lot of space. There will be an iPod-type device built in to a car – they’re already doing it now, where you can upload all your music in your car so you don’t have to carry a CD or carry an iPod anymore. You can just hit a button and all your music is right there. That’s the next thing: being able to store more music, better quality, but taking up less space.”

Listen to my complete interview with Ed here: http://www.box.net/openmike101#openmike101/1/52605102/516848666/1

Ed remembers the pre-digital era, when the radio business was mostly controlled by a small group of large corporations and nonprofit media organizations. Since gospel music abounds on Internet radio stations, “you have to stay current with the website,” especially in making it easy for listeners to download artist podcasts,” Ed said. Audiences, he noted, “can pretty much listen to what they want to. I even have an Internet station myself. You don’t have to rely on a radio station to play what you want to hear.”

ED LONG

Nowadays, Ed pointed out, AM radio stations tend to shy away from music programs – preferring, instead, to embrace talk or news formats. “The digital age has changed it,” he said. “People don’t tolerate the AM signal – the sound is not as clean. But we know our target audience: it’s about 50 years of age, and they know the kind of music we play.” A list of typical WIMG gospel artists would include such names as Donnie McClurkin, Marvin Sapp, Hezekiah Walker, Byron Cage, Kirk Franklin, and Tye Tribbett.

(Listen to Hezekiah Walker's boisterous performance of "Souled Out," here:

Adding CD-quality audio is costly, Ed added, because it calls for more bandwidth to accommodate the signal. "My station sounds the way FM used to sound before digital, so it takes up less space and it's not as expensive," he said. "If the music is good, people won't mind (a slightly flatter sound) as much."

To keep listeners engaged, WIMG's strategy is to keep a playlist that is somewhat more elastic than those of most mainstream AM music stations, Ed said. At many stations, "you will hear the same 10 to 15 songs every couple of hours," Ed observed, "because they want you to hear a hit whenever you turn the station on... Our playlist is not as tight as some." Some of the slack in the lineup, he said, is taken up by breaking in new artists - one way in which WIMG cements its relationship with its core audience. Just the same, cracking the lineup is extremely difficult for unknown performers, Ed added.

We'll close this week's blog with an emotional live performance by one of WIMG's typical artists,

Marvin Sapp, on the contemporary gospel tune, “Never Would Have Made It.” You'll find it here: 

Legit downloads creep into vogue on sites

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#2)

It was a pivotal time for music in the digital age.

June 1999. Shawn Fanning, a student at Boston’s Northwestern University, invents Napster, an online music peer-to-peer file-sharing service.

Giving the music industry fits with its end-run around the legal music market, Napster lets millions of ecstatic users share MP3 files. The service lasts through July 2001, when it is shut down by court order. But its impact profoundly changes the music industry. Napster stirs a voracious public appetite for downloadable music.

Fast forward nearly a decade, to June 2008. The speaker is George Van Horn, an analyst with market-researcher IBISWorld. 

"We expect illegal downloads will reach a tipping point, beyond which, further growth will be difficult,” Horn says. “As online music becomes more readily available, and more affordable, we'll see an increasing number of music fans indulging in legitimate downloading, attracted by a legal, quality, guaranteed product." (To read Horn’s remarks in entirety, go here: http://www.ibisworld.com/pressrelease/pressrelease.aspx?prid=127.)

Legitimate downloading? What happened to the MP3 revolution?

Back in Napster’s heyday, users pursued the site's illegal MP3s with a chest-thumping bluster and a spirit of defiance fully sprung from the head of Karl Marx. “I’m not really doing anything wrong – the music companies are already making plenty of money,” some might say. They might also say, “I’ve already paid for these tracks by buying them in vinyl, so I’m entitled.” Marx’s belief was that whoever controls the distribution of media controls the means of production and thus wields enormous power. The heyday of Napster embodied an out-and-out revolt against the big distributors, fueled by the revolutionary spirit of the Internet.

It’s hard to believe that illegal downloading could be going out of vogue when you consider a teenaged Morgan Stanley intern’s July 2009 report on teens’ use of media. The 15-year-old author declared that teen-agers “listen to a lot of music,” but are “very reluctant to pay for it.” The intern observed that most of his contemporaries have “never bought a CD,” and roughly “eight out of 10” are “downloading it illegally from file-sharing sites.”

(Read the full, thought-provoking piece here: http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0.pdf)

Could it be, could it just be, that people are actually willing to pay a price to access something legally, even when a free illegal option is available? Could it be that ongoing prosecution of illegal sites is slowly turning the tide and driving more listeners towards legal downloads?

Yes.

We’re seeing the beginning of a change in attitude about downloading that has raised the outlook for legal music-download services. This projected growth coincides with a surging interest in not just single tracks, but digital albums. In October, United Press International reported that sales of digital albums in the United Kingdom topped 50 million in less than five years, outpacing album sales on CD in their first five years.

Against that backdrop, legal downloads sources are mushrooming. Spotify, a European-based digital music service with 500,000 paying subscribers, appears poised to launch in the U.S., later this year, according to a report by paidContent. (http://paidcontent.org/article/419-spotify-does-expect-u.s.-launch-before-2010s-out/) And Sony Music is launching a new store called Ariama.com that will sell classical music downloads and CDs from over 50 labels.(http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2010/10/05/sony-goes-direct-to-classical-lovers-with-ariama/)


On that note, let me introduce today's “Open Mike Live” spotlight. We're looking at 1201music.com, a jazz-downloads site that is stepping up its efforts to enter the legal-downloads fray. Marketing director Mechele Shoneman gave me an exclusive interview. (You can listen to the entire interview as a podcast, here: http://www.box.net/files/0/f/52605102/1/f_516846328) 


1201music.com (http://www.1201music.com) is noteworthy for its range of music, from classic jazz by Louis Armstrong to more nontraditional rock-flavored jazz by artists such as Dauner Mariano Saluzzi. The site also has distribution deals with iTunes and Amazon.com.

Shoneman, based in Marlboro, New Jersey, is in a good position to comment on the changes in people’s media use that have reshaped the music industry:  She didn’t start out in digital music, but spent 15 years working in traditional marketing for old-media companies such as publishing houses Prentiss Hall and Simon & Schuster. She handled marketing for catalogs, books, and print advertisements, then moved into telecom marketing with Lucent. Her resume also includes a handful of entrepreneurial forays into the online market, including an environmental website called Be Turtle.com.

MECHELE SHONEMAN

 

 “The beauty of online is the economies of scale,” Shoneman says. “You can build out an idea within a couple of months with very little investment and find out if you’ve got something or not.”

1201music.com, she explains, is “essentially a catalog site.” It is best known for its Black Lion label, which specializes in British jazz musicians and international jazz figures and carries a lot of reissued material by seminal artists such as Thelonius Monk.

Shoneman notes that the “distribution network today is 90% online - Amazon and iTunes are the kings of the industry.” And the public’s shift toward buying separate tracks has created “an incredible challenge for online digital music businesses, because their margins are razor-thin and it’s really become a volume business.”

A major challenge, Shoneman says, is dealing with the big third-party distribution networks and “trying to get on the top of the list to run special promotions." She addes that "unless you have a really original title or artist, you’re just another commodity.” Shoneman says separating yourself from the pack “can get really rough,” so it’s important to “build up an identity online that goes over and beyond these distribution channels.”

A jazz site like 1201music has one important thing going for it: The loyalty of the jazz-buying public, which for many years has typically accounted for about 3% of all recorded music sold. That isn't a big figure, but it is constant, even amid the sea-change in the music industry's fortunes.

Shoneman is candid about the challenges music distributors of all stripes and sizes face in competing against the onslaught of media choices vying for the attention of potential record buyers: “We’re at the very beginnings of watching what used to be a one-way conversation," she says. "Today, with the advent of digital media, we have the ability to listen to conversations, to start conversations, to get involved in and to really listen to our customers.”

Joining the dialogue, she says, makes good business sense. “It costs a whole lot more to engage a new customer than it does to re-sell to an existing customer - about 5 to 10 times as much. As well, marketers have been forced to become more genuine. Claims like “the latest and the greatest,” you don’t hear any more.”

Shoneman says the amount of media with which average Americans are hit every day has created “a very discerning audience.”

 It’s "very important to have conversations," she says. "Shoving one-way messages at people, like email blasts, is a no-no. The jazz audience at 1201music is very opinionated, very educated, and they have a long, long memory of what’s gone on in the music business and the music industry. For instance, trying to walk into a forum and talk about a very light subject like, hey, what do you think of our site design? will quickly spiral into one conversation about one particular disc. It’s a really touchy area.”

Shoneman recalls that “in the old days it was all about demographics – who is your audience, how old are they? What’s their income? What do they like to do? What’s their lifestyle? And now it’s really more about what they think. How do they move in the world?"

What "you think your influence is, is almost always wrong," she says. "You can do all the market research in the world, but you can always be surprised.”

Shoneman says that in light of the technology-based upheaval in her business, she would now devote "upwards of 70%" of a budget to online marketing. "Understanding how those keyword-driven algorithms work, so that you come up on searches like Google and Bing when somebody, for instance, types in “jazz music,” is absolutely critical," she says.

“Online, it is all about keeping score," she says. "I can track somebody from the time they came to my site, how much time they’re on my site, which product they’re looking at, and push a promotion at them with dynamic marketing – which you can’t do off line. Off-line, you’re spinning in the wind. Online, it’s a very defined way to go after someone.”

(Learn more about Mechele
Shoneman's marketing businesses at www.repaz.com)

Next week, we'll examine the digital boom's impact on a traditional radio station.

I'm going to let Thelonius Monk, one of 1201music.com's featured artists, take us home with a 1963 televised performance of his famous composition, "Round Midnight." You can watch it here: