DubMC

Managing the Floodgates: The Discovery of New Music

As technology continues to shrink the world and music becomes more and more accessible to the masses, what's the best way to find the new music that you love? It's a task that can seem overwhelming at times, and presents unique challenges for those in the global music industry. To help answer the question, we asked some industry pros what their strategies were for discovering the latest gems, and we present their responses here.

Erich Ludwig, Senior Director of Operations at MediaUnbound (www.mediaunbound.com), a company that provides recommendations services to other media companies finds the question particularly interesting since he is in the business of music discovery. He also works as a consultant for artists who are trying to get discovered, and speaks to the question from these two different angles. Here are his responses:

1. What are your top 5 sources for finding new music on the internet?

On a personal level, my answer is as follows:

a) email from friends/colleagues
b) IM's from friends/colleagues
c) last.fm
d) music blogs (primarily African music oriented)
e) Google news feeds (using appropriate key-words)

The best source of recommendations has traditionally come from friends. Especially for those of us in the "snobby about my music" category. Even though I work for a recommendations company, I don't use personally (or even in my consulting business) any of our companies' clients on a regular basis to discover music. That is likely due to change...I'll explain more once we go public...

Anyway, personally I find most discovery engines not able to capture my diverse interests, although I certainly play around with them for competitive analysis and for testing our own products. There are also some problems for recommendation services for international music, whihc is primarily what I listen to. These problems have to do with tagging and naming, as well as with actual usage data. These 2 things are large components of a recommendation system, and one can see the problem here easily on last.fm just by entering any artist whose name has accesnts or is easily misspelled (try Ramata Diakite for an example. Her last.fm page is http://www.last.fm/music/Ramata+Diakite/). I'm Ramata's manager, and have linnked up all the other permutations of her name on her page:

Ramatou Diakité
Ramata Diakité
Ramatou Diakite

There is no easy way to get around this, and it severely affects the discovery of international music. International labels & managers MUST be sticklers for tagging and labeling tracks and albums to take advantage of the recommendations systems being built into many new web sites.

2. Do you have any other sources for finding new music? If so, what are they?

My network is really very good at helping me find new music. Usually that involves someone in my network contacting me to ask about this project they are working on, and asking me various questions about that project - how to market, promote, distribute, book, license, sign to label, etc...Through this process I sometimes find music that I personally enjoy, and other times, find stuff that is great, but that I may not love. And of course WOMEX, SXSW and a couple other festivals are great places to load up on new music.

3. How do you  manage the overflow of music that comes across your inbox, desk, and ears? Please give specific tools, techniques, and philosophies.

Five Tips for New/Emerging Musicians Who Work Across Cultures

1. Identify and Express -- in simple/accessible but compelling words -- the essence of what you are doing; musically, artistically, culturally; if possible, work with an outside person who has experience doing this, so that you can get a fresh perspective and someone with a wide scope who can help you put things in a context that is useful/inspiring for a more general audience.

2. Set up systems each step of the way; Think: "how can I take the work I am doing now and document it and make tools now, so that the next time I do this it is that much easier and I have a running log of what worked and what didn't"?

3. Identify your "ideal customer" and Brainstorm ways to reach that specific population; don’t try to be all things to all people; otherwise your music will sound like a lot of other lowest common-denominator music which downplays the strength of music that explicitly crosses cultures; once you do it for one target market do it for another; keep in mind that the "ideal customer" for physical recordings, digital recordings, and live concerts may be different and require different channels for reaching them.

4. Each project (a live set or an album or a "digital bucket" as I heard one client call it recently) should have something (not many things) that ties it together; this could be a tradition or hybrid being explored... or a narrative, real or imagined... or a historic time period, etc.; this makes it easier for people to bite, chew, and digest; if each project is all over the map, it is harder to build bridges across cultures; within that limitation, of course, there can (in most cases, should) be diversity (in tempo, meter, timbre, lyrical content, instrumentation/arrangement, etc.); think of your project as one of many projects you will do in your career, so you do not need to cram it all onto your next album or next set; in the case of touring, repeat concerts might be more likely if you have something different to offer in year two.

5. Understand why you do what you do and integrate that into every decision you make; your methods can (and should) reflect your vision/mission as a musician/artist/performer/human.

Bonus Tip (more of a musical tip): don't use cheesy synthesizers (unless you are trying to make a joke or a point); if you are not sure what a cheesy synthesizer is, ask the most cutting edge musicians you know; in some cultural contexts synthesizers are the only affordable/accessible way to re-create certain historic sounds (big horn sections, for example); but I find -- at least with most of the media that tends to cover global music in the USA -- cheesy synthesizers (or dated electronic beats) are a tip-off that someone has not thought about how their sound is going to translate to the audience here, who may read it as "dated".

-- Dmitri Vietze, rock paper scissors, inc. :: music of global significance :: publicity for the world :: www.rockpaperscissors.biz