80 Proof Music actually has a few enemies, in two forms: other digital music stores, such as iTunes Music Store and AmazonMP3, and organized forms of music sharing, like BitTorrent and Usenet.  Both forms have significant mindshare and their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and what 80 Proof Music must do is provide a superior or comparable alternative to them.

Competing with the existing stores is easy.  They dictate format and quality, where we intend to give our customers choices.  Their previews are small clips where we will provide full-length previews.  We’re optimizing for the customer experience, which is not something we feel the other parties do.

Competing with file sharing is more difficult, because free is what it is.  Here we can’t provide a superior product because you can find full-quality copies for free and there’s no beating that.  What we can do is give people the same quality product and give them the option to support the artists too.

We can also provide something missing from torrents and Usenet posts; reliability.  No torrents stalled because there isn’t anyone seeding.  No missing chunks because some of the binary posts didn’t make it through.  I’d like it if we had more advantages over piracy than that, but simply giving people who enjoy the superior aspects of pirated music a legitimate way to collect seems like a good start to me.

80 Proof Music is going to give artists a way to sell to people like Bryan and I, who want to buy music, but don’t want to buy it at reduced quality or on physical media.  Right now the only ones meeting that demand are the torrent seeders and Usenet posters.  I have to hope that the larger vendors remain ignorant (or arrogant?) and continue to give up the potential business, because it can only mean good things for us.

Is this true?

I am of the opinion that the answer is yes. and no.

See, I should be a fucking politician.

What I mean is that it’s obvious that the “niche” buyer is slower to make the move but it seems to me that the move is currently being made. En mass while the hardcore collector seems to be moving back towards the resurgent vinyl format. Which is funny. There was a time that the cd seemed destined to kill vinyl and now, some 25 years later, vinyl and digital have joined forces and outflanked the disc.

That said, I think time has proven that fans of smaller music genres are more than happy to actually purchase music and that’s where we hope to come in. As the Americana music buying public begins this digital transition we hope to align ourselves with the bands/labels to become the first place you think of when you wanna buy that new (insert band here) disc. Perhaps, somewhere down the line we’ll even add the option to purchase vinyl to the store.

What do you think?

While I don’t think it was the intention of the organizers, the major theme of the day seemed to be younger music industry people (who made up almost the entire set of speakers and panelists) helping older musicians (the bulk of the audience) understand how to survive and hopefully thrive in the changing world of professional music.

In fact, the most avid attendees of the excellent class on constructing an Electronic Press Kit given by Ivan Peña of Mohawk Bomb Records, were also among the oldest in the room.  They eagerly took in advice on topics such as how to properly tag their MP3 files, and how freely sharing their music may be the most important thing they can do to grow their audience.

The “Meet the Critics” panel was perhaps the most traditional fare of the day, consisting of local critics from print, web, and radio organizations basically instructing musicians on how to best approach them with their music.  It’s always encouraging to see this sort of open exchange effectively executed.

Less encouraging was the Alternative Media Promotion panel that Bryan participated in.  While there was a sprinkling of clues throughout the discussion that perhaps helped some audience members have a better idea of what web services like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are and why they should matter to musicians, an actual introduction was eschewed and those less familiar with the topics were left to try divining their nature through conversational context–a difficult task when you don’t even know the vocabulary.

I also took particular exception to the presentation of these services as merely a collection of advertising mediums, which disappointingly is what it appeared the thrust of the panel was meant to be.  This is not harnessing the web to build an audience, it is abusing it.  I myself abandoned MySpace some time ago due to frustrations with spam from overzealous promoters.  And just as I realized that none of the pro-spam panelists were taking the blame for this, someone else in the audience spoke up with the same notion, asking if no one thought that the reason everyone had fled MySpace for Facebook was specifically because of the advertising saturation.  My solo applause drew eyes from the stage.

Certainly, social software on the web is a great way to talk about what you’re doing and promote yourself.  But it can be done in a way that is not repugnant.  All of these services give a way to designate someone as a friend or someone you wish to keep up with in some way.  Create a personal account for your personal acquaintances.  Create a professional account for your networking and promotion and don’t abuse a friendship or the potential friendship of an acquaintance by obligating them to read your advertising.

Perhaps equally important, when building a network of people who do wish to receive your commercial missives, target them.  Not everyone with a Twitter account is a music fan.  Not everyone on Twitter who is a music fan cares about Bluegrass.  If you blast everyone you can with your advertising, you’re going to be reported as spam, and that’s it for you.  Good luck building a brand if you can’t keep a username alive.

I’m going to describe one more point of disaffection regarding yesterday’s discussions.  The guy from TuneCore …I hardly know where to begin.  Granted, Bryan and I walked into his talk late, so perhaps we missed something which would have offset what we did hear, but I was absolutely astonished by some of the things he said.  During his speech, he compared his service (a digital distribution middle-man) to CD Baby and in a stroke that could most favorably be considered a careless mistake (though said as it was of a competitor, more likely an act of deliberate mischief) he described fees and requirements of CD Baby’s service that I can find no evidence of on either their website nor their WikiPedia page.

During a later panel, he spoke from the audience in terms of wonder and fascination about an emergent behavior of TuneCore users, where they organized within the forum to exchange reviews of each other’s releases on the various digital distribution endpoints (iTunes, etc.), driving up each other’s ratings.  Color me aghast.  How are arranged, non-critical reviews a good thing?  Kudos to them for doing so well with dumping another social trust system into the landfill, right next to eBay’s!  Well done!

On a more positive note, even the musicians from the old school (which again, was most of them) seemed quite open and interested in the Internet side of things throughout the rest of the day, and that very well may have been due to the TuneCore guy’s keynote speech.  As a founder of a digital music store, one of the tasks I expect to spend a lot of time on in order to succeed with my business is educating consumers on why digital is OK, and indeed often preferable over physical media, and why the quality of the digital content they buy is important.  So if he had any hand in that, he does deserve my thanks.

It was an interesting day overall, allowing Bryan and I a good deal of insight into areas of the industry which we are less intimately familiar with, and for all my disagreements, I feel a lot of good work was done on the part of everyone involved to foster music and musicians in the Tampa Bay area.  I sincerely respect all efforts toward that goal, and hope to attend again next year.