Outdustry

Happy Birthday MicroMu

It seems like it has been a hell of a lot longer, but our little concept record label MicroMu (known in Chinese as 不插店, or ‘Buchadian’), turns 1 year old today. You can feel paternal pride radiating throughout Outdustry HQ as we package up a one year compilation album of b-sides and rarities to celebrate:

Zip file album download, or track by track:

1.Zhao Guang – No Cloud In The Sky

2.Liu Dongming – Bird’s Nest

3.Gangzi – Untitled

4.Zhang Yiding – Red Scarf

5.Zhang Weiwei – Song

6.Wu Ningyue – The Lotus Blossom

7.Zhang Qianqian – Improvisation

8.6 Kings – Drinking Song

9.Di Ku Ai – Migrant Bird

10.Shouwang – Run Away

11.Liquid Oxygen – All Things Are Uncertain

12.Wu Junde – Lullaby

13.Li Zhi – Happy When You Feel Pain

MicroMu is our attempt at a sustainable record label model in an environment where people, by and large, aren’t used to paying for music. The solution? Give music (and lots of other things) away for free, build a loyal community around it all, and then support this (largely) through a partnership with a brand who shares your audience. Or, as we say in our label intro:

MicroMu is an experimental, sponsor-driven, free-to-user record label model designed to discover new talent, create original music and reward artists in seemingly impossible conditions.

It is obviously a lot more complicated in reality and in the long run involves a number of other areas of revenue generation, but you get the gist. I’m sure at some point we will get round to laying the whole thing out for you but we are still in a very ‘developmental’ stage so don’t feel justified in holding ourselves up as a successful case study quite yet.

How It All Began

Back in June 2008, we were putting on a show for folk legend Zhou Yunpeng in Beijing and were looking for a suitable support act. We heard demos from a young singer songwriter in Nanjing called Zhao Guang and liked what we heard to the extent that we paid for the engineering student to travel up to Beijing and support one of his all time heros. It seemed a waste for Zhao Guang to come and go without doing some recording while he was up here. It’s just that we didn’t have a record label.

The MicroMu concept had been fully laid out at Outdustry some time before, but this recording opportunity with a new artist seemed to get those fires going again, except this time we had a deadline of a few days to get things rolling. One phone call to Plastered T-Shirts supremo Dominic Johnson-Hill later and we had our cash sponsor. Dominic’s clothing brand has seen rapid growth in recent years, largely thanks to his relentlessly creative marketing and appreciation of audience (and, of course, cool t-shirts). It was a perfect match. We were aiming at a young, alternative-culture loving audience, so was he. Money well spent on his behalf, money gratefully receieved on ours…

After the Zhou Yunpeng show we took Zhao Guang for a midnight recording session at rehearsal rooms up near Gulou. He was in and out within an hour, having laid down six tracks, most in the first take = our first release.

Within the following week we had come up with a name, MicroMu (in reference to the compact nature of the business model, amongst other things), set up our website and, exactly a year ago today, made our first blog post:

So, What Is MicroMu?

Lets keep this simple to start with:

MicroMu is a record label – We discover musicians, record these musicians and then release the recordings to you, the fan.

It is obviously a lot more complicated than this in practice but, to be honest with you, this is a huge experiment so lets start slowly. The most important thing for you to know at the moment is that we are going to give away all of our recordings for free through this blog.

The whole process is funded by one sponsor: Beijing based T-Shirt company Plastered. Why are they doing it? Simply because they love the idea and want to support independent music. Did we mention that they make the best t-shirts in China ?

We will obviously explain a lot more about how this will work as we go, through the blog. There is a long journey ahead of us and we hope you can help us along the way. Please, download our music, leave comments, tell a friend. Together we can change the way that music is made in China, in a way where everyone wins.

It’s all about the music.

MicroMu

Simple enough really. We then obviously had to go on and explain how this music could be free in another post, the idea being to involve the fans in the whole thinking behind the label in a never ending dialogue conducted through the blog. Nice and transparent:

How Can This Music Be Free?

MicroMu is an incredibly simple idea. Here is a handy bullet point guide for you:

• MicroMu records some music
• This music is put on MicroMu.com for free download.
• All of this amazing, free music means loads of people come to our website.
• Loads of people coming to our website means that a brand will want to share all the attention and will pay money to do so.
• Plastered T-Shirts is that brand. They are making the whole thing possible by paying us money to be our brand partner.
• We use this money to cover all of our costs and pay the artists.
• The more people that visit the site, the more money Plastered will give us.
• The more money Plastered gives us, the more music we can make, the more royalties we can pay artists…..the more free downloads we can have on the site!

You see how simple it is? The most important thing for us….is YOU! You are ‘paying’ for this music just by being on this site.

Tips on how to help:

• Visit the site often for updates.
• Leave comments, tell us what you think.
• Tell a friend
• Tell them to tell a friend
• Tell them to tell a friend to tell a friend
• Instead of emailing/bluetoothing our songs to people, send a link to where they can download them for free on MicroMu.com
• Write about us on your blog
• Turn up to our shows.

Very kind of you. Thanks a lot..

Fifteen releases, 100 blog posts, 2000 comments later and here we are. Oh, and a whole heap of videos:

Dead Flower by Shouwang

There are big plans in the pipeline for MicroMu but as with all big plans they are prone to big changes. As I said, it is all a huge experiment and we are amazed and hugely encouraged to have gotten this far. Particularly encouraging is the warmth of reaction we have received from the Chinese music fans. Our music has quickly found its place in the hearts of an impressively wide audience as well as plaudits in some of the most demanding forums of the Chinese media and internet. We have also been lucky enough to work with, and in some cases record, some of the biggest and best names in Chinese independent music. That’s about as good a start as we could have hoped for. Onwards and upwards!

Many thanks to Dominic Johnson-Hill: Scholar, philanthropist, patron of the arts, dyslexic. Many thanks also to Eggplant and all of our artists: Zhao Guang, Liu Dongming, Gangzi, Zhang Yiding, Zhang Weiwei + Guo Long, Wu Ningyue, Zhang Qianqian, 6 Kings, Di Ku Ai, Shouwang, Liquid Oxygen, Travellers, Li Zhi, Zhou Lao Er, Zhang Guonian.

© Outdustry 2009

As the Chief Economist for PRS for Music and one of the few actual economists in the music business Will Page has a reputation for providing clarity, both on the state we’re in as an industry as well as the direction we should be heading. PRS for Music is one of the largest collecting societies in the world, representing some 60,000 songwriter, composer and music publisher members, collecting and paying royalties to them whenever their music is played, performed or reproduced.

Will and I actually first met over a beer at a music venue I was booking at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005, when he was working as a music journalist for Straight No Chaser. We have both taken somewhat drastic turns in our careers since then and, by happy coincidence, Will stumbled across this very blog and decided to get in touch to reminisce. We have been chatting ever since about his work, particularly with regard to it’s relevance to China.

Will Page

His latest report The Long Tail Of P2P, co-authored with Big Champagne’s Eric Garland, was presented to much fanfare at this year’s Great Escape Festival in rainy Brighton, UK, an event I was lucky enough to be invited to attend (Thanks Jon McIldowie and UKTI). Will has kindly agreed to me running a few questions by him on the subject:

Ed Peto: There has already been a good deal of coverage on your work on the demand curve for digital music consumption – from New Scientist to the Financial Times – particularly with regards to your contention of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory – but, for the benefit of people who haven’t read it yet, could you give us a quick elevator version of your latest Long Tail Of P2P report and its findings?

Will Page: Sure. The original Long Tail concept, as laid out by Chris Anderson in a famous Wired Magazine article in October 2004, goes like this: If you offer people more choice, and help them make that choice, they will take that choice. It proposed that in a world of widespread Internet access, it no longer makes sense to cater to the public appetite for the most popular CDs, DVDs and books. Instead, even the interests of the smallest niche might now be served. In short, the tail of available niche products would lengthen (supply-side effect) and then fatten with sales (demand-side effect). And so the “Long Tail” emerged.

To recall, Anderson’s theory relies on a change in the nature of the supply curve given barriers to entry falling and a great many new products can now get to the market. However, it takes two curves to tango in economics, and consideration of the demand curve completes the picture. What we uncovered from that analysis was a shock to some and no surprise to others: a ‘hit-heavy, skinny-tail,’ log-normal distribution for legal online music consumption; a distribution not that dissimilar from what one might expect from a more traditional, bricks & mortar store.

This dormant tail, pinhead pattern appeared across a number of digital music providers, in the markets for singles, albums, as well as streams – the three markets for legally consuming music online. But of course the illegal music market has been with us for longer, and is considered to be much larger than the legal one – so the next intuitive step was to understand the shape of demand in P2P. What we uncovered was another hit heavy skinny tail distribution, and that’s what we presented at the Great Escape. The results raised a few eyebrows, that’s for sure.

EP: Here in China we see also see an incredibly head-heavy distribution curve, with pop hits dominating the musical landscape. I tend to explain this by suggesting that, in China, music is used as a way of fitting in and not as a differentiator as it often is in the west. In short, the reason, I believe, is largely cultural (with censored media being another contributing factor).

According to your research, however, western consumers also largely seek out hits even when presented with the essentially infinite choice offered by illegal services such as P2P. Do you think that, like the Chinese, western consumers also have a deep-rooted cultural proclivity for hits, or is the behaviour you have identified in your study a hangover from a period of limited inventory, limited access and bottlenecked media and marketing? ie. Is it nature or nurture?

WP: That’s a great question. Firstly, the fact I’ve uncovered this hit heavy distribution for music does not mean the Long Tail is dead – there may be other examples of ‘fattening’ tails in books, film and television. But then perhaps that’s the point – some forms of media goods are for sharing (i.e. music at a festival) and others are for private consumption (i.e. a book on a train journey). Maybe that’s why ‘Book Clubs’ still haven’t taken off in a social networking era?

Now to your question. I don’t think it’s a hangover – there have always been niche markets, and one could argue that they were more effective prior to the long tail era kicking in. For example, I wrote for the niche music publication Straight no Chaser for seven years, and spent a large amount of time digging for rare Brazilian and African vinyl.

Point being, the magazine has closed (advertising revenues in a digital age) and lots of those niche shops have closed down. So I reject the hangover assertion, there may well be examples of the tail being a lot fatter prior to the book coming out. On that note, let me also add that you have to really think about the quality of data, both then and now. Niche music products are often purchased in second hand record stores – I can testify to that as I practically live in them! Not only is there no data on second hand sales, there’s no copyright either. That’s an important dynamic in an online physical world like Amazon, where first and second hand goods are priced side-by-side. A fat or skinny second hand niche market is therefore (i) hard to prove and (ii) even harder for artists and songwriters to benefit from. It’s an anomaly that’s really worth pondering. .

Another angle towards answering your question is to consider the tools which are being used to understand media markets like music, film and books. I mean this whole Long Tail debate has been dominated by economics, and us economists are terrible at losing sight of reality. Another angle, which we raise in the paper, is that of ‘culture’. On that note, I’m inclined to cite Andrew Bud, the Executive Chairman of mBlox, who has been like a professor to me in pioneering much of this long tail work to date::

“…It means something that we are seeing a log normal distribution in the sales data for tracks. That only happens if the more successful a track becomes, the larger are the random forces affecting its sales. But then the question is how does the market know how big a track is? Why does the scale of a track’s success matter to the choices people make? An obvious answer is that it’s through people chatting to each other and seeing the music talked about in the media. That’s what culture is. So the fact we’re seeing the log normal distribution here may point to the power of culture on people’s choices. Whereas Chris Anderson’s hypothesis of a Pareto power law would be much more about random, individual choices – people alone with their computers. So perhaps, this debate of thick versus fat is really about the power of culture in determining demand…”.

- Andrew Bud

Andrew Bud

EP: Are you able to project future behaviour from this research?

WP: No. We have not attempted any projections or forecasts based on the analysis. The original singles, albums and streaming data sets we worked on were for the twelve months from 2007 Q4 to 2008 Q3. We kept the same time period for the illegal P2P file sharing study, to keep it consistent. What we’re doing now is to look at data sets concluding in 2009 Q1 – so whilst we’re not essentially looking forward, what we can now provide our management team with is monitoring and interpretation of the changes in demand over time.

On that note, co-author Eric Garland raised two concepts in the study which merit attention here: the primacy of listening and music hoarding. To recall, these trends lead to a peculiar irony: widespread listening to music that is never stored coincident with vast stores of music to which no downloader ever listens. I think you can use our rigorous long tail analysis and these two concepts to debate future behaviour. ‘Hoarding’ especially – that’s an incredibly important concept for the music industry to get its head around.

Eric Garland

EP: Do you think that once music recommendation/discovery services have fully developed you will still see the same head-heavy results as you are seeing now?

Consider the following hypothetical online music platform:

• Every track in the world is one click away, with negligible download/buffering time.
• Each user’s music preference profile is perfectly mapped and updated continuously in real time according to their actual listening habits, as opposed to music they just download and then ‘hoard’.
• Music is recommended to this user purely based upon this profile (and other users with similar profiles).

WP: The first thing to appreciate is that it could go either way – ‘good’ recommendation tools could fatten tails, or concentrate activity around heads. What’s going to be fascinating is that we’ll soon be able to answer your question with evidence. By that I mean that excellent sites like We7 and Spotify have gained incredible traction already this year, and that will allow them to further develop their offerings in line with the customer’s demands. From there, we can see what demand looks like, given the infinite choice from supply. .

There’s an important point to be made here, though – which is when critics have dismissed my work by saying that a long tail market without a good discovery tool is just noise. I mean, sure, I take the point – but I’ve got to counter it, as it implies ‘when the facts don’t fit the theory, then there has to be something wrong with the facts’. The objective, surely, is for these promising music sites to become profitable first and foremost, whereas fattening the tail is an optional extra. If the latter results from the former, cool – but it doesn’t necessarily have to work that way.

What I’ve seen so far – and by that I mean some of the staggering success stories of digital music in 2009 Q1 – suggests that the idea that ‘when you offer people more choice and help them make that choice’ their behaviour is a lot stickier, and their willingness to roam a lot more tamer, than the theory would have had us imagine. My colleagues Chris Carey and Gary Eggleton (who are both far brighter than me) think that our work in this area now has us close to helping the music industry understanding the limits of unlimited choice. That’s really exciting as we’ll be able to offer our songwriters and publishers important new insights that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

On that note, I’d like to quote psychologist Barry Schwartz who summarizes his excellent book, The Paradox of Choice, in a recent TED lecture: “There is no question that some choice is better than none, but it does not follow that more choice is better than some. There’s some magical amount, I don’t know what it is but I’m pretty confident that we’re long since passed the point where options improve our welfare”.

EP: How do the results of this research impact upon your work at PRS for Music?

This question is two-fold: what does it mean for PRS for Music and what does it mean for its stakeholders – the rights holders and users who we bring together. I think you can see three applications of the long tail work, those being costs, segmentation and investment strategies. With regards to the latter, there are some fascinating debates to be had. For example, Anita Elberse has looked into why you get irrational bidding wars in the book publishing industry, even when the market is not in a healthy state. Her work is really inspirational and I’d strongly recommend your readers check it out. My interpretation, for the music industry, comes down to this – if you’re in a market affected by the long tail, do you bet large, bet small or do you bet at all.

One final point, though, is this. My work is not ‘anti’ long tail, nor does it have anything to do with ‘bashing Chris Anderson’ – the press love a Punch and Judy show, but this is about understanding markets. Let me reiterate, I really rate the Long Tail Book and recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet read it. Moreover, Chris Anderson’s ‘blog’ was an excellent tool for engaging people like me into the debate that we would otherwise not have known about. I’ve always said that as soon I find real evidence of the long tail at work, Chris will be the first to know and I’ll be the first to celebrate. There’s another collaborative project we got going here in London, it’s wrapped up in confidentiality just now but the way things are beginning to look, I should be letting him know very shortly!

© Outdustry 2009

Last weekend I attended SPOT Festival 2009 in rainy/sunny Aarhus, Denmark. The organisers kindly flew me in, along with a number of other international music industry types, to soak up some outstanding up-and-coming Danish artists as well as generally spew forth about our respective markets.

As far as Danish bands go, I particularly enjoyed Oh Land’s orchestral experimentation on the opening evening, as well as Kiss Kiss Kiss‘ danceable indie-pop on the P3 stage, with the Danish crown (in my ill-informed opinion) going to one of the best live acts I have seen in a while, Who Made Who, who rocked a packed out mega-barn of revellers on the Saturday night.

I also have to make an honourable mention of Norwegian artist Rockettothesky who’s esoteric take on song-writing – including a track about ‘horny ghosts’ – stayed with me for some time after the show, to the point where I bought her album Medea off eMusic as soon as I got home. Good stuff.

As far as me ’spewing forth’:

Video made by (and courtesy of) SPOT Festival

Thanks very much to everyone at SPOT, particularly Martin Røen Hansen and Henrik Friis, for a fantastic weekend.

© Outdustry 2009

As Music Editor at mega portal Sina and man responsible for highly regarded Dystopia blog, Pilos Chan is a keen observer of the Chinese music scene and one of the most respected music writers and critics in China. In this guest post he offers insight into the rise and ‘crash’ of international live music in China. Photo Credits: Sina

I was at the “Techno Papa” Juan Atkins’ show the other night, talking with top Hip-Hop critic Badbrain about this year’s live music market. We both felt that there’s nothing to say but “sigh”. More… »

Client: Modern Sky
Project: Hedgehog (Blue Daydreaming) + Re-TROS (Watch Out! Climate Has Changed, Fat Mum Rises)
Engineer: Tom Coyne

Outdustry clients Sterling Sound have just mastered a couple of cracking Beijing indie albums. Hedgehog went so far as to say that they “could die happy” after hearing the results: More… »

So, it seems that Google China has finally decided to make some noise (translated story) about their free MP3 search service. When this went into beta almost a year ago we were predicting that it would be game-changing news, but somehow it has remained under the radar. At their press conference today, however, Google China announced that all four major labels are on board, as well as all the major publishers and some 140+ indie labels, through their partner in the project, Top100. This amounts to some 1.1 million songs being given away for free. Surely this equals headlines? More… »

More… »

While there are some legitimate digital music download sites in China – including 9Sky, Top100 and the recently launched Wawawa – digital music is proving to be a tough sell in the P.R.C, partly because of the market dominance of Baidu’s free mp3 search. There are, however, people making decent profit in this as yet unmeasurable market: the hackers of Apple’s iTunes store gift vouchers and their local agents. More… »

Beijing indie label Modern Sky have announced a new folksy-style event called the “Strawberry Festival” in the Chinese media (Chinese links here, here and on the Modern Sky website). Details are still a little vague but available information so far suggests three stages and 60 bands to be spread over the 1st-3rd of May at the Tongzhou Canal Park in Beijing. Everything else TBC.

More… »

The last release on our in-house label MicroMu has been going down a storm. Li Zhi’s live album, ‘There’s Nobody On Gongti Dong Lu’ was recorded at a packed show in Beijing’s Yugong Yishan venue in mid-January.

Since it’s release on Jan 22nd, the Jiangsu folk hero’s first offering since 2007 has been meet met with unanimously glowing reviews across the Chinese internet. At the time of writing, well over a month after it’s initial release, it is still sitting strong at number 6 on uber-review-site Douban’s Best New Release list, ahead of some pretty distinguished company: More… »

Chinese mega portal Netease recently released their 2008 China Internet Communication Report (h/t Adam Schokora). The report generates statistics from the behaviour of some 200 million Chinese netizens who use Netease’s range of online products (ie. Netease Blog, Netease BBS, Youdao Search Engine, Netease Channels and Netease Posts). According to the authors: More… »

In April 1985, big-haired pop-duo Wham! took to the Worker’s Gymnasium stage in Beijing infront of thousands of screaming Chinese fans, becoming the first western pop act to play communist China.

This unlikely event had taken band manager Simon Napier-Bell 18 months of negotiations to organise; a process documented in his 2005 book I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch. More… »

Almost exactly a year ago I posted on the hype surrounding the Chinese music scene. I boiled my feelings down to a kind of cautious optimism ie. way too early to start billing Beijing as one of the best music cities in the world (as some over-zealous mainstream western media would have you think) but a genuinely exciting place to be nonetheless. More… »

A shorter, edited version of this piece appeared in The Guardian under the title ‘Online Pop Explosion’. Please treat this longer, draft version as a separate article.

When unknown Chinese singer Yang Chengang wrote and recorded the song Mice Love Rice in Wuhan, Southern China in 2000, he would have had no way to predict it’s eventual impact. More… »

Midi School have just announced (Chinese link) that they will be delaying the festival by another ten days or so. Dates are yet to be confirmed. The official reason is that the government expects millions of Chinese tourists to descend on Beijing during the upcoming October holidays to look around the Olympic facilities, including the Olympic Centre planned for use by Midi. More… »